An Era’s Chord Changes

How does a lost piano concerto or two get found again? Ask Lukas Foss, one of the deans of 20th century composing.

His first two concertos were premiered more than four decades ago, to enthusiastic reviews--the Second won the New York Music Critics Award in 1954--but then lost to the vagaries of programming and the composer’s reluctance to promote his own work. Until now.

The Pacific Symphony, with two young winners from the last Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, will not only perform them this week but record them for Harmonia Mundi.

“It was a complete surprise,” Foss, 77, said from his home in New York. “I had no idea. But why not? It’s fun to have something like this done.

“I’m fond of both concertos. But when they told me about the project, I tried to interest them in my latest work, ‘Solo Transformed,’ for Peter Serkin. But things were already set.”

Foss will be at the Pacific Symphony concerts today and Thursday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa. In addition to his concertos, the program will feature Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” and Saint-Saens’ “Carnival of the Animals.” Foss also will lead composition seminars (open to students only) Friday at USC and Cal State Fullerton, and for the recording session, Sunday and Monday at the center, he will play his 1989 “Elegy for Anne Frank” to complete the Pacific disc.

The idea for the project arose after 1997 Cliburn gold and silver medalists Jon Nakamatsu and Yakov Kasman, respectively, played with Pacific Symphony in the summer of 1998.

Music director Carl St.Clair and executive director John Forsyte decided they wanted to do something special with the two winners.

“We wanted to find a project that would be great for the symphony, great for an American composer and great for these two artists,” St.Clair said recently from Stuttgart, Germany, where he was finishing a three-week conducting stint.

This season the orchestra has been showcasing American music written before 1950, so it seemed natural to St.Clair and Forsyte that the project should also focus on such works.

But they also narrowed the field to music that had never been recorded, was out of print or was no longer known.

They started putting out feelers to the music community two years ago, seeking suggestions for works and composers, and after considering several they settled on Foss and his two virtuosic concertos.

“He’s a very important American voice,” St.Clair said. “When Lukas turns 80, he’ll be in a very select group of American composers who are still working and living their lives. This music is important.”

Because there are two concertos, the works fit neatly into the plan to use both Cliburn winners. Officials could have asked just one of them to play both works, but that would have heaped a heavy burden upon the pianist.

Said St.Clair: “It’s very difficult to say, ‘OK, in addition to all the other responsibilities and engagements one comes to when you win such a competition [as the Cliburn] that you’re going to learn two very new concertos.’ That’s a little unfair. This is not standard repertory.

“And, basically, they’re both very fine artists. We wanted to showcase both winners.”

He Taught at UCLA for 10 Years

Foss’ career has been remarkably multifaceted and distinguished. He began composing when he was 15, soon earned high praise as a concert pianist and then went on to have an important career conducting and teaching.

He taught at UCLA for 10 years, starting in 1953, and served as music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, Milwaukee Symphony and Brooklyn Philharmonia, among other orchestras.

His works fall into two main periods--a neoclassical one that includes the two piano concertos (composed in 1944 and 1951, respectively) and a more experimental one in which he explored serialism, chance techniques and untraditional notations.

The Second Piano Concerto, in fact, marks the end of his first period.

A sample of the second period also will be recorded: “Elegy for Anne Frank,” which he wrote in 1989 and later incorporated as the slow movement of his Third Symphony, “Symphony of Sorrows.”

Either way, salvaging lost work, getting it performed and especially getting it recorded is an expensive proposition for an orchestra.

The price tag for the weeklong project will run a little over $100,000, according to Forsyte, and the orchestra had to do specific fund-raising to cover it. Key donors are Orange County philanthropist Frances Bass, the San Francisco-based Clarence Heller Foundation and the New York-based Aaron Copland Fund for Music, which provided $15,000 specifically to help pay for recording costs.

To get the Copland grant and to convince Harmonia Mundi that the works were valuable, the Pacific had to submit recordings of the music.

This wasn’t a problem for the Second, though it did require a search for an out-of-print mid-’50s LP recording of the work with Lukas as soloist and an orchestra composed of Hollywood studio musicians led by Franz Waxman.

But for the First, which exists only in manuscript, they had to hire two pianists to record a two-piano version of the work.

A Backing Grant and Label Support

The Copland grant is the Pacific’s first from the New York organization, which promotes the creation and performance of American music. Last year, the fund considered 154 recording proposals; Pacific Symphony’s was one of 30 that received support.

“Making decisions is not easy,” said Lisa Kang, Copland grants manager. “First and foremost is the quality of the music and the importance of the repertory to be recorded.”

Their only other consideration is that the recording gets solid distribution.

“The label doesn’t matter, as long as there’s substantial distribution,” she said. “That assures us that this music will be disseminated to the public, which is part of the fund’s objective.”

As Cliburn competition winners, Nakamatsu and Kasman had already been featured on a disc issued by Harmonia Mundi marking the event, and it seemed a natural for that label to get involved in the Pacific project.

Plus, “I like to record American composers, with American orchestras,” said Robina Young, artistic director of Harmonia Mundi USA, based in Los Angeles.

“This is our ninth recording of a 20th century composer. Most of them, sadly, don’t sell. You have to be seriously kamikaze to do this.

“Basically, the equation to do 20th century music is, you have to sell twice as many records as anything else just to break even. We’re talking mechanical rights, publisher’s rights, union costs of the orchestra and a union house, and the limited public. The costs are variable, but it’s definitely a ratio of 2 to 1.

“But I’ve always been aware of your responsibility to the times in which you live and to works of quality.”

Though still active as a composer, Foss isn’t that happy with the concert scene today.

“There are problems,” he said. “One is the media and the fact that if you’re not on television, you don’t exist. That poses some severe problems. Composers have hired publicity people, and it also means they’ve become very competitive.

“Gone is our nice avant-garde club. We all belonged together, showed each other our music. Now, nobody speaks about ‘our’ new music.

“But I’ll be glad to be coming back there for a week. I am very nostalgic about my UCLA days. I had a wonderful time there for 10 years. I miss it. Otherwise, I do what I always did. I still conduct, I compose and I play the piano.”

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* Lukas Foss’ First and Second Piano Concertos today and Thursday, 8 p.m. Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $18-$50. (714) 755-5799 or OCPAC at (714) 556-2787.