Foss Meets Younger Self in Two Concertos

An artist’s very early works often feel like old snapshots, forever dated. A figurative early painting by Jackson Pollack or a romantically lush string quartet by Anton Webern tell us that the painter could draw and that the composer could write a tune. But once we know about these abstract pioneers, their juvenilia will always seem outmoded, like passe hair styles and hemlines.

In drudging up two forgotten early piano concertos by Lukas Foss, however, the Pacific Symphony went on a treasure hunt. Its perhaps unrealistic goal was to find worthy, neglected music rather than merely reveal the roots of the 77-year-old composer. It wanted new repertory for two prize-winning pianists, Jon Nakamatsu and Yakov Kasman, gold and silver metal winners, respectively, of the 1997 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. And it wanted to commemorate the millennium with a CD of significant 20th century American music not otherwise known. Thus the two examples of a young man’s passing fancies were on the orchestra’s program Wednesday night at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, and the performances, conducted by the orchestra’s music director, Carl St.Clair, will be recorded this weekend by Harmonia Mundi.

Foss is a famous name in American music. A pianist, conductor and educator as well as composer, he has often been compared with Leonard Bernstein. The two were students together at Tanglewood and remained friends. Like Bernstein, Foss (who was born in Berlin and immigrated to America when he was 15) is a ravenous eclectic. But unlike Bernstein, Foss’ eclecticism has made him seem a musical chameleon. A common simplification is to divide Foss’ composing career into an early period of Neoclassicism followed by a later avant-garde one. In fact, Foss has composed in dozens of styles, all and none are his own.

Practically every new thing that has come along in music has found its way into his work--12-tone technique, improvisation, chance operations, Minimalism, collage. He has an ingrained sense of musical history, and a strong connection with Bach and early music, and that too is always evident in the music, whether in fantastical arrangements of early music or simply a respect for counterpoint. At his most interesting, Foss is a one-man musical Tower of Babel.

But the early concertos, engaging as they are, are only hints at the later composer. Foss told the audience before the performances that he hadn’t heard them for such a long time that he could barely remember them, that they sounded like the music of someone else, an ambitious beginner certainly competent and confident but not yet adventurous, not yet fully Foss.

The first piano concerto, completed in 1943, began as a teenage work following Foss’ studies with Hindemith, and it is infused with the teacher’s pragmatic style of the period. It has small perky themes developed with clockwork counterpoint; it experiments with percussion; it is optimistic music full of rhythmic spunk. The piano part is the voice of a young virtuoso showing off everything he can do.

The second concerto, written a decade later, is a big statement. It was a success in its time, winning the New York Critics’ Circle Award in 1954 but then ignored as its composer began to move in new directions. Its tone is overtly American, and the piano part is massive. While the first concerto is set in motion by a one-bar trumpet fanfare that takes us off to the races, the second is built around a broad four-note trumpet theme that sets the mood for expansive development.

Nakamatsu was the soloist in the first concerto, and his mastery of this score, which has never been published, was remarkable. He played it from memory and with ebullient rhythmic verve. Kasman was score-bound for the larger, second concerto, and, while he handled all the virtuoso demands of the solo part with apparent ease, his performance felt less personally involved with the music. In both works, St.Clair sounded thoroughly at home with music that asks for lively rhythmic definition. Still, it did seem like a lot of work on everyone’s part for these historical curiosities when so much of Foss’ more important music (say, the powerful cello concerto written for Mstislav Rostropovich) is equally ignored.

St.Clair began the evening with Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” lavishing unsubtle sensuous detail on every phrase. But, as if energized by all that indefatigable early Foss, he ended with a strikingly animated and joyful performance of Saint-Saens’ “Carnival of the Animals” that employed both of the evening’s piano soloists (with Nakamatsu a particular delight) and the actor John Vickery enthusiastically narrating Ogden Nash’s amusing verses.