Green Umbrella Offers Primer on Finnish Composer Lindberg

Magnus Lindberg, a friend and Finnish musical contemporary of Esa-Pekka Salonen and a protegee and IRCAM associate of Pierre Boulez, is, at 39, the very model of a 1990s international composer: technologically oriented toward the coming millennium yet highly aware of and thoroughly adept at postmodern styles of the 20th century.

Three of Lindberg’s recent works made up the core of the latest Green Umbrella program given by the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s New Music Group, Tuesday night in the Japan America Theatre. They served as appetizers for the world premiere of Lindberg’s “Fresco,” commissioned by the Philharmonic, which will be performed tonight by the full orchestra.

The latest of these, “Related Rocks” (1997), achieves that style in which technology and acoustic instrumentalism combine and support each other, resulting in a homogenization seldom achieved in attempts of the past 50 years. Two pianists/synthesizer operators, along with two steadily employed percussionists, play with scale-based passages and common nontonal materials--the pitched percussion elements lending color to otherwise gray, abstract textures.

As executed confidently by pianists Gloria Cheng-Cochran and Vicki Ray and percussionists Scott Higgins and John Magnussen, this U.S. premiere proved completely fascinating.

More problematic, which is to say, less agreeable, denser and more difficult to follow, Lindberg’s “Arena 2” for 17 instruments seemed like a musical scenario for a horror film or, at the least, a chaotic narrative with no firm conclusion. It treats the instruments as members of blocs, not as individual contributors, as in chamber music. Its complexity is more off-putting than charming. And it lasts an uncomfortable 16 minutes. Conductor Lindberg and the little orchestra gave it a solid performance.

Measurably more old-fashioned, Lindberg’s “Duo Concertante” (1992) for two soloists and an ensemble of eight amiably showed off the expert soloists--cellist Gloria Lum and clarinetist Lorin Levee--and conjured a total sound fabric of considerable handsomeness. The composer conducted this U.S. premiere.

Two solo works by American composer and longtime CalArts musical administrator Mel Powell offered more contrasts. His Three Madrigals, as played effortlessly by flutist Anne Diener Zentner, showed the composer’s lyric/dramatic bent, using the instrument as a highly expressive device capable of wide-ranging effects. Violinist Mark Baranov played Powell’s eloquent, active and pensive Nocturne (revised 1985) with great conviction and seamless legato.

The curtain-raiser was Cindy Cox’s “Primary Colors” (1995), a moody, bucolic and ultimately jazzy romp for violin, clarinet and piano, played with good humor by Bing Wang, David Howard and Cheng-Cochran.