In a California State of Mind

What does it mean to be made in California? The California on display in the current exhibition with that theme at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is a state of physical beauty and dark deeds, good looks and bad karma, a place where even the extraordinary assimilation of cultures in its art might be viewed as cultural exploitation.

There is some truth in this view of California. Sometimes its art isn’t as luminous and optimistic as it is meant to seem. But sometimes it really is. Music, for instance, tells a story of profound cultural assimilation and of revolutionary invention, and a small part of the story was told Monday night when the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group made its contribution to the various “Made in California” events around town.

A theme of this first Green Umbrella concert of the season--held downtown in the Colburn School for the Performing Arts’ Zipper Hall, the new home of the series--was that California is a state of mind. For Esa-Pekka Salonen, Lou Harrison, Harry Partch (the only native) and Jonathan Harvey--the four composers on the program--California is ultimately an excuse or motivation to be themselves.

The most recent example of the West Coast working its psychic magic is on Salonen, who has spent the year in a sabbatical from his post as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, living the life of an L.A. composer locked away in his study. He has produced a cello concerto and a choral work (which have had European premieres), and an extended piece for piano, which was given its first performance Monday by Gloria Cheng.

Before he came to Los Angeles eight years ago, Salonen had been a systematic Modernist, if a quirky one. In California, however, he has rediscovered harmony; it is here, he confessed to the audience before the performance, that a structuralist realized how much he loves notes and how they sound together.

In “Dichotomie,” which is a dazzling 18-minute fantasia, Salonen does not so much renounce his earlier European Modernist techniques as find exciting new uses for them. The dichotomy of the title refers to two opposing sections. The first, “Mecanisme,” is a series of arresting mechanical gestures that begin to go awry in erratic, unpredictable ways. Salonen uses the metaphor of a machine becoming human. The second movement, “Organisme,” which is thick in texture and rings out with gorgeous tremolos and alluring trills, Salonen compares to “a slender willow that moves gracefully in the wind but returns always to its original shape and position.”

The dichotomy becomes, in the end, two ways of looking at the same thing. The deeper metaphor may be that it is music about absorbing many techniques (everything from Ravel’s ornate sensuality to Steve Reich’s pulsations), a music of bending and growing. It is also a hair-raising virtuoso vehicle.

In the first movement, Cheng wore gloves with the fingers cut out to protect her hands during passages of flamboyant glissandi so thrilling that they practically generated gasps from the audience. But then Cheng’s performance was miraculous in the sheer speed and sureness of her fingers, in the rich depth of color and sonority she obtained from the piano, and in the sheer expression of joy she brought to a demanding new work.

As the newest work on the program, “Dichotomie” also demonstrated that an original look at harmony continues to be part of the essence of the California approach. For Partch, it was the invention of a 43-note scale. His “Barstow,” eight songs based upon scribblings of hitchhikers and written in 1941, was performed in a version for string quartet and baritone. John Schneider smoothly enacted the texts less in the manner of the gruff composer than as an engaging tramp.

Harrison’s large-scale Grand Duo for violin and piano from 1988 is yet another view of harmony. It brings together many musical cultures into a unified style that blends Elizabethan music, Indonesian gamelan, 19th century French opera . . . and the list goes on. (It ends with an Asian-sounding polka.) The performance by Philharmonic violinist Michele Bovyer and pianist Joanne Pearce Martin was game, but busy violin vibrato and heavy pedaling made it too sonically soupy for a clear blend of diverse cultures. Although the 83-year-old Harrison is the widely acknowledged dean of California music, his music is only lately finding its way into the Philharmonic consciousness, and clearly the style is not yet a comfortable one.

Harvey’s “Song Offerings” was the evening’s interloper. The British composer did teach at Stanford University for several years, but this work is earlier, written in 1985. Still the four songs for soprano and small chamber ensemble using texts by Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore couldn’t better fit into the California sensibility. Harvey has a magnificent ear for shimmering, startling color, and eerie harmonics seemed to magically hover all around the hall. The soprano Elissa Johnston sang with a sense of transfixing mystical rapture, and Steven Stucky conducted a performance of ravishing beauty.