‘Older’ Works Help Celebrate 60 Years of Monday Concerts

Celebration and some indulgent nostalgia were in order as the Monday Evening Concerts staged the final two events in a three-part tribute to its 60 years in operation, ending Monday night at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The core idea: looking back at a forward-looking L. A. institution.

Last Wednesday, the spotlight was on the California EAR Unit, a mainstay of recent Monday Evening Concerts schedules. The EAR Unit celebrated by taking stock of “older” works, dating back to Stockhausen’s 1969 “Dr. K.-Sextet,” a still fresh-sounding study in ensemble energy, cued by flutist Dorothy Stone and with residual sonic debris skittering across the stage. Earle Brown’s “Tracking Pierrot” paid respects to a seminal 20th century model, Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire” setting, slipping gently in and out of aleatoric tinkering.

Minimalism crept in with Frederic Rzewski’s “Coming Together” (1972), its fragmented and echoic text by a soon-to-be-slain Attica inmate hypnotically reiterated by Arthur Jarvinen over a driving pulse. Closing the program was the wonderfully rough-edged Euro-minimalism of Louis Andriessen’s “Worker’s Union,” a nice, loud bit of grungy art music, fueled by a locomotive rhythm and no fussy attention to actual pitches.

Jarvinen’s own witty 1986 romp, “Egyptian Two-Step,” provided comic and textural relief via chromatic harmonica, baritone sax and aerosol cans sprayed in rhythm. By contrast, Mel Powell’s “Sextet” exemplified the composer’s lucid, waste-not, want-not profundity in a post-serial style, played with exacting passion by the group, serious but hardly dry.

Monday night’s ad hoc MEC Ensemble program was even more grounded in the “old masters.” Copland’s “Sextet” exuded an aptly lean, taut energy, its spiky harmonic tensions interacting with open-plained themes. David Sherr put in dynamic performances of Luciano Berio’s “Sequenza I” (1958), for flute, and the more cohesive, emotional “Sequenza IXa,” for clarinet.

Visiting conductor Gerhard Samuel’s “Hyacinth From Apollo,” text by Jack Larson, had its Los Angeles premiere. A kind of rough-and-ready requiem, with oblique AIDS references, it is an intriguing piece for string quartet, percussion and the unorthodox presence of saxophone--Sherr, again--and was sung with more boldness than subtlety by tenor Matthew DiBattista.

Fittingly, this Monday Evening Concert closed with “Celebration-Sequent I,” by Dorrance Stalvey, the series director for nearly 30 years now. The work alternately chatters and broods, in a fine piece of enigmatic expressiveness.

With all due respect for things new and newish, though, the concert’s highlight was Webern’s Symphony, Opus 21, dating back to 1928--all economy of gesture and beauty sans sentiment.