Pacific Symphony program goes to Bali and back again

In 1941, the Canadian composer Colin McPhee, just back from Bali, and the young English composer Benjamin Britten, a pacifist who had come to America to avoid serving in the British army, got together in New York to record some of McPhee’s two-piano transcriptions of Balinese gamelan music. Not everyone was pleased with the results. Two pianos could hardly capture all the layers, the tuning, the metallic luster of the gamelan orchestra.

But it was hard not to smile Tuesday night when three of those transcriptions, “Balinese Ceremonial Music,” were enticingly played by Gloria Cheng and Robert Thies at the Irvine Barclay Theatre to begin this year’s installment of the Pacific Symphony’s American Composers Festival. The transcriptions are resourceful, relatively faithful and a lot of fun. We know too just how thoroughly Indonesian-infected is the music McPhee and Britten went on to write.

They were hardly alone. Debussy and Ravel found the first gamelan appearance in Paris in 1889 life-changing. Many more composers -- from Olivier Messiaen to Pierre Boulez, from Lou Harrison to Steve Reich and Michael Tilson Thomas -- have been Bali-besotted (although to be fair, the Javanese gamelan, which is what Debussy and Ravel heard, has been just as, if not more, influential).

Still, the festival’s first program, “From Bali to the Big Apple,” offered a glimpse of how a small, distant, exotic island has steeped into the American musical psyche. Indeed, McPhee, who died in Los Angeles in 1964, is remembered by those who encountered him at the end of his life at UCLA as a broken, bitter man who had left his heart in Bali.

Neglected and uncertain how to proceed into multicultural territory, he wrote little, but he did leave behind some gorgeous orchestral music that has a kind of Gershwinesque gamelan tinge, such as the short Nocturne for chamber orchestra played by members of the Pacific Symphony on Tuesday.

Other composers, notably Harrison, did move on. But not Jose Evangelista in “O Bali,” written in 1989 by yet another Canadian aping a gamelan with a chamber orchestra. He did a nice job of it with flutes, strings and vibraphones, but the piece lacks a voice. Carl St.Clair, the Pacific Symphony’s music director, conducted both works with more energetic enthusiasm than Balinese bliss.

After intermission, Reich’s “New York Counterpoint” finally showed just what moving on can mean. Written for 10 clarinets on tape and one live, it demonstrates how the gamelan can be transformed into something else entirely. All metal becomes all clarinet. The interlocking rhythmic and melodic patterns of Indonesian music become the interlocking and melodic patterns of Minimalism. And on top of all that, Reich lets the clarinet, within its rigid structure, swing (or, at least, imply swing).

Richard Stoltzman, who premiered the work in 1985, played it Tuesday. And leave it to Stoltzman to find a way to mug his way through seemingly mug-proof music. He was, at times, too much, but his playing was also so wonderfully musical and his clarinet sound so wonderfully fruity that he actually helped bring Bali to mind (gamelan players are not averse to irreverent mugging themselves).

Next came John Adams’ clarinet concerto, “Gnarly Buttons,” evoking the composer’s own relationship with the clarinet, which he studied with his father (an amateur jazz musician) while growing up in New Hampshire. It has nothing to do with Bali and originally had next to nothing to do with Stoltzman, who first played it at the Ojai Festival eight years ago with little sympathy, understanding or mastery.

It is, however, one of the great American clarinet concertos, and Adams is a featured composer in this year’s festival, so here it was. And fortunately, Stoltzman has finally found his way into it. That way is mostly through Benny Goodman, a big influence on both Adams and Stoltzman.

There is a lot more to “Gnarly Buttons” than New Hampshire and jazz, and Stoltzman is hardly over showing off in it, as in his rhythmically fuzzy approach to the lapping melodies of the first movement.

But the challenge of the jagged central Hoedown held the clarinetist in check. The pop-style song around which the last movement is based brought out Stoltzman’s sentimental side. He Benny-ized the tune with little glissandi. He crooned. He turned operatic. He was personal, schlocky, a little outrageous -- and deeply moving.

Stoltzman can be hard to take, but this brought tears to my eyes.

St.Clair could do no more than help the ensemble keep up. There could be little doubt that we were not in Bali anymore.