What You Hear Isn’t What You’ll Get

As this album suggests, Lukas Foss has been liberally helping himself from the smorgasbord of 20th century styles since the ‘30s. Conceived by the 17-year-old Foss for clarinet and rewritten for piano at the age of 21, the Piano Concerto No. 1 (1943) is a formidable piece for a kid, with the Teutonic hand of his teacher Hindemith apparent everywhere, along with a dash of Bartok in the third movement. Within a decade, Stravinsky would be Foss’ role model, as the insistent ostinatos and rather familiar syncopations in the orchestra part of the Piano Concerto No. 2 (1952) brazenly indicate, while the wide-open vistas of Foss’ old friend Copland dominate the second movement. The CD then leapfrogs over Foss’ avant-garde period to “Elegy for Anne Frank” (1989), a gentle, tense meditation with a pounding Ives-like brass-band eruption. All are first recordings except the Piano Concerto No. 2-which Foss recorded in the 1950s and “Elegy” is heard both with spoken interludes from Frank’s diary and without. St.Clair backs the soloists expertly, hampered by claustrophobic sound in Segerstrom Hall.