In the End, a Thing of Beauty

It has taken an absurdly long time for the Los Angeles Philharmonic to perform a piece by Lou Harrison, the 83-year-old dean of California composers and a major world figure. And it remained no easy matter for that to finally happen Thursday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. It required an Austrian guest conductor, Franz Welser-Most, with a liking for Harrison’s wonderfully tuneful Suite for Violin, Piano and Small Orchestra from 1951 (a Leopold Stokowski favorite as well). And it appeared to also require an excuse, namely a tie-in with the “Made in California” exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

But that was just the start. Welser-Most, whose recurring back problem has forced him to cancel twice before with the Philharmonic, was laid out flat once more last Sunday. He had devised a curious program--in addition to the Harrison it also included Mahler’s Romantically haunted Seventh Symphony--and a last-minute replacement could not be found with both pieces prepared. But the Philharmonic came close with James DePreist, who substituted Mahler’s Tenth Symphony for the Seventh.

This proved an even stranger program--the Tenth, which Mahler did not live to complete, comes with its own set of problems--but also a more interesting one. Harrison wrote his suite at Black Mountain College, in North Carolina, where he taught for two years before returning to his California home in Aptos for good. And while the work wasn’t literally made in California, it represents a kind of California dreaming that has both a Los Angeles and a Mahler connection.

Harrison, who was born in Oregon but grew up in Northern California, studied at UCLA with Schoenberg (whose music picks up right where the most advanced passages of the Mahler Tenth leave off) in the early 1940s before moving to New York. But it was in the country atmosphere of Black Mountain that Harrison was able to reconnect with his eclectic West Coast roots, turn away from Schoenbergian 12-tone composition and develop a musical style that was open to a whole world of music ranging from Elizabethan dance to the many musics of Asia. (It is a timely coincidence that Harrison conducted the premiere of his suite in the chamber music venue of Carnegie Hall, where the recent music of Esa-Pekka Salonen, which also reflects a new direction influenced by California eclecticism and exoticism, will be introduced to New York on Sunday).

The Harrison suite is really chamber music written for an “orchestra” of 10 players. There is lots of percussion (especially gorgeous gongs) and glitter from harp, celesta and tack piano. There are two movements that imitate the sound of Indonesian gamelan orchestras, and there are influences from Korean,

Japanese and Chinese music as well. On top of that, in the six short and agreeable movements, are placed rapturous long lines of melody for solo violin and a rhythmically exciting piano solo.

Those soloists were violinist Robert McDuffie and pianist Christopher Taylor, and they were both engaging virtuosos who demonstrated a real feel and flair for the style. DePreist, who is music director of the Oregon Symphony in Harrison’s home state, was winning as well, overseeing a genial, colorful and subtly detailed performance.

Mahler’s Tenth is a work that requires one to take a position. The first movement, a tortured and touching adagio of great sophistication, and the short central movement were pretty much completed and scored before the composer’s death. The two Scherzo movements and glowing Finale exist in outline, requiring some filling-in of harmonies, inner lines and orchestration.

Most Mahler conductors do not perform more than the first movement. But a performing version by musicologist Deryck Cooke has its champions, most notably among them Simon Rattle, who conducted the piece in Los Angeles in the ‘80s and has just made an extremely effective recording of it with the Berlin Philharmonic. There are other versions as well, and the one by Remo Mazzetti in a new revision and just recorded by the Cincinnati Symphony, is more adventurous. None, of course, are Mahler.

DePreist went with the Cooke, but his interpretation was unusual in the way he allowed the music to unfold in its own right rather than seeming to emphatically argue for the work’s validity. At times, DePreist underestimated Mahler’s macabre character, and he didn’t always inspire the orchestra. Tension slipped in the long, slow Finale.

But there was a grace and dignity to DePreist’s stewardship. At least for a listener with mixed feelings about what would have been a very great work had Mahler lived to finish it, it was good to let the music speak for itself. And much of it, especially in the luminous string playing, was very beautiful.

After Harrison’s demonstrating how much beauty is part of our West Coast musical heritage, that seemed enough.

* The Los Angeles Philharmonic program repeats tonight, 8 p.m., $10-$70, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A., (323) 850-2000.