A Celebration of Carter and the Clarinet

The Monday Evening Concerts has reached a remarkable milestone. At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Monday, it began its 60th season. No other major series devoted to the exploration of new music, in this country or abroad, has so survived. So while the actual anniversary is not officially until the spring for its founding at a Silver Lake residence as the Evenings on the Roof, it is not too soon to begin celebrations.

Yet impressive as the series’ longevity is, another upcoming birthday actually overshadowed it on Monday. The program, performed by Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne from Montreal, began with the West Coast premiere of Elliott Carter’s Clarinet Concerto, which was written two years ago and is a wonderfully lyrical and spirited piece. This is but the first, and not the newest, of several recent compositions by Carter we’ll be hearing throughout the Southland over the next two months as we approach the composer’s 90th birthday Dec. 11.

Carter has composed steadily throughout his career, and his importance as an American composer of intellectual rigor and timeliness was fully established as early as 1951 with his First String Quartet. The complexity of his music, which functions something like a computer chat group with several threads of conversations going on simultaneously, has often left the general listener behind. But audiences are catching up, and Carter, in the glow of his late years, has refined his style so that the poetic beauty is more direct. There are still a great many notes, but they flow more sequentially and speak with greater immediacy.

Not just the quality but also the quantity of Carter’s latest work has simply left the musical world in a state of awe, and perhaps a little perspective helps. Carter is but 10 years Gershwin’s junior (as John Adams is Philip Glass’). Had Gershwin (who died at age 37 in 1937) enjoyed Carter’s longevity, we would still have had masterpieces from him as recently as the late 1980s.

The Clarinet Concerto is classic Carter and now makes three the number of great American clarinet concertos (joining the 1948 pioneering one by Copland and Adams’ recent “Gnarly Buttons”). And of the three, Carter, who has always had a flair for wind writing, gives the clarinet the most to do and to say.

Joining different small instrumental groupings for each of seven short sections, the clarinet can seem tranquilly subdued with brass that have their mutes on, but full of mirth in a later section when the mutes come off. There is a certain anger expressed in its interactions with the unpitched percussion, and it shows fear as it is chased at exhilarating speed by other winds. With the strings, it enters into a state of sublime wonder. To end, the clarinet plays with heroic intensity before the entire ensemble, with a hint of sorrow at the end.

The soloist, Simon Aldrich, is one of the ensemble’s two clarinetists and a spectacular player. Still, the performance disappointed. It felt all speed and hard edges, turning warm music to icy steel. Lorraine Vaillancourt, the ensemble’s conductor and artistic director, clones Pierre Boulez’s conducting gestures with uncanny skill. That ensures enviable precision. But she lacks Boulez’s compensating flexibility.

Harrison Birtwistle’s “Secret Theatre” closed the program. The British composer’s 1984 score is Carterian in its rhythmic and sonic complexity and its interplay between song and dance. Again, one marveled at the performers’ precision while wishing for more depth, but the trade-off felt less extreme.

Two recent pieces by younger composers were at the program’s center, and they brought out the best in the Canadians. “Pascal’s Sphere” by an Australian, Mary Finsterer, is based on pretentious science and metaphysics, but the sounds of whirling celesta, futurist horn calls and blast-off figures from cello and bass were stunning. “Alap & Gap” by Canadian composer Jose Evangelista is a new music trope on the raga form with static opening and rhythmic conclusion. It ends with the sense of staccato clocks speeding up, that may not have Carter’s or Birtwistle’s deeper understanding of the way time affects human experience, but it dazzled nonetheless, as did a sizzling performance.