A Salute to Americana

Banned in Boston, John Adams found a gracious welcome in Glendale Saturday night. To be fair, the Boston Symphony probably would have loved to have one of the Adams works, “Shaker Loops” or “Fearful Symmetry,” that he conducted Saturday night at the Alex Theatre.

Controversy currently flairs in Boston because the orchestra hoped to replace upcoming performances of choruses from his opera about terrorism, “The Death of Klinghoffer,” with something less thought-provoking. Adams refused and asked that none of his music be heard on the program.

The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra had no such problems with what had long been scheduled as an upbeat occasion of Americana. It courted no controversy in an evening that began with Ives’ “Country Band March”; it concluded with Adams leading “Rhapsody in Blue,” with the orchestra’s music director, Jeffrey Kahane, as piano soloist. The orchestra tends to attract a conservative, older crowd to its Glendale series, and the audience appeared delighted with all it heard. No flags were displayed, no effort made to tie in the American theme of the evening’s music with war, terrorism or national tragedy. But it was impossible to miss the American innovation in scores that could not have been made anywhere else.

Easier to miss, though, was the controversy that music now beloved had once generated. What to us is irresistible in Ives’ merry eruption of band music competing for attention--as it did in holiday parades around the town square--must have seemed sheer anarchy when reproduced as concert music in 1904; it took 70 years for it to get a performance.

Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” was a hit from the start, but it was presented as an experiment in modern music at a 1924 Carnegie Hall concert by Paul Whiteman’s band. Even today its identity crisis has not been resolved, as it vacillates between high and low art, and as United Airlines spends hundreds of thousands a year in royalties to use it as theme music.

Adams has long been in debt to Ives and Gershwin, and that, too, once raised controversy in modern music.

“Shaker Loops,” written in 1978 for string septet and later arranged for the string orchestra version that the composer conducted Saturday, was his first foray into the repeated structures and consonances of minimalism, then a radical style. In this score, Adams was the first to move minimalism into the mainstream. Now the work has become a classic, the sliding, revolving, slicing string lines sounding ever fresh. “Fearful Symmetries” was written in 1988 for what Adams calls a “mutated big band,” brassy and jazzed up with the electronic synthesizer glitz that he carried over from “Nixon in China.” It is half an hour of antic high energy that is popular with dance companies, and in a populist style that once produced boos. While not among Adams’ probing pieces, it is cheerful music that pulls a listener along, and it has enough inner rhythmic complexities to keep an orchestra amusingly tense.

As a conductor, Adams has also become increasingly adept at pulling an audience along with him. He appears frequently on the podium, and it shows.

Once a literalist when performing his music, he has become more comfortable, more personable, more exciting. “Shaker Loops” was riveting. The orchestra strings played with silvery sheen. The Ives had electrifying energy. “Fearful Symmetries” was slightly stiffer, its rhythms requiring a rigid baton. Still, it was liberating to hear the work wrested from the ballet pit bands that most often perform it.

“Rhapsody in Blue” was heard in the edgy Whiteman big-band orchestration, banjo and all. Adams emphasized its rhythmic nerve, but he also was generous to the players, giving them room for individuality, and they had plenty to give back. Gary Gray astonished with his liquid clarinet solos.

Kahane, who had once been a student of Adams, doesn’t often show his Gershwin side. He played fast and light, as Gershwin himself had, adding a bit of Bachian clarity to inner lines that was all his own. Although knee-deep in Beethoven (whose five piano concertos he will conduct from the keyboard early next month with this orchestra), you would have never known it from the idiomatic verve of his solo encore, Gershwin’s “I’ve Got Rhythm” Variations.

But then, Adams brings out the American in us all.