A Moody Survey of Modern German Music

In the talk before the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group’s mostly German program Monday night, guest conductor and composer Peter Eotvos reminded us of just how important a musical capital Cologne was in 1966. That was the year he fled Hungary and relocated there. Even after the Nazis and their musical purges, German music had retained its strong pull on the rest of the world. Throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s, American, British, Russian, Korean, Argentine composers--everyone--flocked to Cologne, Darmstadt, Berlin, Donaueschingen. And German radio and record companies triumphantly beamed the news to the world.

No more. Now there is no center, and we are more likely to encounter, in concert or CD, music from Chinese, Japanese, Eastern Europeans, Finns and Mexicans than Germans. It is easier, as well, to keep up with Italian, French and British composers. So this last Green Umbrella concert of the season, at the Japan America Theatre, in which four of the five works were German and none of the composers well known in America, served almost as bulletin from a remote land.

In a program representing the late ‘70s, late ‘80s and mid-’90s, the “early” work was York Holler’s “Arcus,” and it proved an excellent example of the transfer of European electronic music power from Cologne to Paris. Written for the newly formed Ensemble Intercontemporain in 1978, “Arcus” combined the German enthusiasm for futuristic electronic sound with the more French approach of rationalizing electronics into the traditional instrumental realm. A live ensemble at first seemed enslaved to computerized sound on tape but gradually bonded with the electronics.

If Detlev Glanert’s “Mahler/Skizze” is any indication, the mood in Germany had become very different a decade later. Short and gloomy, it is a spooky sonic portrait of Mahler’s neglected, weed-covered grave in Vienna. Stones tapped together and icy blasts from a wind machine are the sounds of the earth. Mahler quotes are hidden among slinky strings and moody winds. Chilling hammer blows at the end recall the apocalyptic Sixth Symphony.

Though British, Simon Holt’s “Capriccio Spettrale,” from 1988, is equally moody, mysterious and memorably haunted. This is music that rarely seems to breathe, as strings slither and an arresting piccolo trumpet (played by Boyde Hood) wails above. A sense of lurking danger also seems to excite Wolfgang Rihm’s “Gejagte Form” (Pursued Form), a piece for large ensemble from 1996 in which skittish woodwinds and harp join in ever more portentous dialogues with winds and brass. By the time a bass clarinet buzzes ominously and bongos bang, it becomes a kind soundtrack for an imaginary postmodern film noir.

Eotvos’ own “Shadows,” also from 1996, is another small dark drama. The composer pursues the form of a concerto for flute and clarinet soloists who are shadowed by a snare drum, strings and woodwinds. Eotvos says his sympathies are with German music, but the score, in three brief movements, leads to a mourning dance from his native Transylvania. The flute gets the most prominent music, and Catherine Ransom played with glowing beauty. Lorin Levee was the subtle, sonorous clarinetist.

The soloists were indicative of a splendid level of performance throughout this difficult program. Eotvos conducts with Boulezian clarity and purpose, and the Philharmonic players could have easily been mistaken for one of Europe’s finest specialty new music ensembles. But in that, this was a uniquely local event. No great traditional European orchestra--and probably none in America--has that kind of flexibility.