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West Coast, Left Coast

Los Angeles
Walt Disney Concert Hall
12/06/2009 -  Festival Dates: 11/21/09-12/08/09
Paul Drescher: Glimpsed from Afar for Quadrachord and Marimba Lumina
William Kraft: Timpani Concerto No. 1
Leonard Rosenman: Suite from "Rebel Without a Cause"
John Adams: The Dharma at Big Sur

Leila Josefowicz (violin), Joseph Pereira (timpani)
Los Angeles Philharmonic, John Adams (conductor)



J. Adams (© Deborah O’Grady)


The recent West Coast, Left Coast Festival at the LA Philharmonic was a survey and inquiry into the influence of California culture on contemporary classical music, through the remarkable ears and eyes of John Adams. The festival was penetrating in lightning strikes, but perhaps not an objective overview of its subject. This was exactly as it should have been. As the historian Kevin Starr commented during the festival symposium, we are neck deep in the in the developing history of this musical period. An objective assessment of this music is not yet possible. Even the renowned music critic Marcel Proost would not be able to grasp and summarize the storm and tidal wave of West Coast music. (See Adam’s blog “Hellmouth” for more on the esteemed M. Proost.) The Philharmonic is unquestionably foresighted and fortunate to have Adams as the newly appointed Creative Chair.



This series of concerts was both excellent and extraordinary, for the most part. Adams and his colleagues were the first to admit that they can hardly begin to answer their own questions. Kevin Starr’s comment about West Coast horticulture in the 19th century was perhaps the most interesting attempt at a summary: just about any living thing will grow wildly, wherever it is planted in California; and most things musical have taken root and flourished.


The most memorable parts of this festival were ferociously diverse, including Adam's new piece: City Noir, and his violin concerto: The Dharma at Big Sur. Superlative performances of certain "classics" of the West Coast repertoire were also unforgettable: the vastly underperformed Lou Harrison Piano concerto and William Kraft’s First timpani concerto. The Kronos Quartet (as always), and Airborne Toxic Event and the Calder Quartet also proved themselves absolutely at the edge of the continent. Terry Riley and John Cage remained behind and above it all.


The Symposium: “The Art of the State,” moderated by Adams and including the panelists Phil Lesh, Thomas Newman and Kevin Starr was absolutely fascinating, shedding incisive light over the entire three weeks of music. Star film composer Thomas Newman descends from an illustrious musical family that includes his father, composer Alfred Newman who worked with Gershwin and Jerome Kern, and his cousin the famed songwriter Randy Newman. California historian Kevin Starr, whose latest book inspired Adam’s City Noir offered an encyclopedic birds-eye perspective. Phil Lesh, the bass player for the rock band the Grateful Dead, was perhaps the most fascinating of them all. Before helping to found the Grateful Dead, Lesh studied with Luciano Berio and Steve Reich at Mills College in Oakland. He funded a recording of Elliott Carter's Concerto for Orchestra with conductor Oliver Knussen, and interviewed Carter for the New Music Box website.


Adams lamented that writers have not examined rock music as a serious art form. This comment prompted Kevin Starr's response that we are still in the rock era, and that it is not possible to analyze a phenomenon that is still so close to us. This approach to the concept of genre in the music of today struck me as more perceptive than the assertion that genre no longer exists or has become irrelevant. Once again Kevin Starr's comments were revelatory: "What is California? California is the State of America: America, only more so." Starr’s point (paraphrased from William Stegner) is that there is everything here in California, artistically, that there is in the rest of America, only more of it with more intensity. If he were to write a book about the future of California, he would describe a state that contains everything that exists across the globe.


The last concert of the festival that I attended was one of its pinnacles. John Adams and the young violinist Leila Josefowicz were the headliners. In the pre-concert talk Adams commented that he could only do this in Los Angeles. The evening began with the San Francisco independent, Paul Drescher. Drescher and his colleague Joel Davel played two electro-acoustic instruments, the quadrachord and marimba lumina that had been designed, invented and built in Northern California. The first is a long wooden box with four piano strings attached to amplifiers and played in several ways. The strings are struck with mallets or chopsticks, bowed with dental floss, or vibrated with a rag soaked in turpentine. The other instrument is a synthesizer, altered to respond much like a marimba with great variation and sensitivity in its inputs. The music itself was a kind of spicy alien jazz, composed with a gifted melodic sensibility and performed by virtuosos. There was the influence of the tradition of Middle Eastern music but there was also the electronic feel of Kitaro and Jean-Michel Jarre. It also felt like an electronic version of the “Bowed Piano” that I heard in the American Composers Festival in Orange County a couple of years ago. It would be hard to overstate the epic quality of Drescher's music. There was more than high-tech musical wizardry; there was an incredibly musical talent driving the electronics.


The next piece, the Timpani Concerto No. 1 by William Kraft, was one of the highlights of the entire festival. Kraft has been one of the most important figures in contemporary music on the West Coast for the last 40 years. He was the principal timpanist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, as well as Composer In Residence and the founder of the Philharmonic New Music Group. His comments in the pre-concert talk were both hilarious and moving. He claimed to have waited 25 years for this particular performance to come together. While the Concerto has been performed many times by many orchestras, he was thrilled to have Joseph Pereira as the soloist and the LA Philharmonic as the orchestra. The concerto begins with the timpanist donning gloves with moleskin on the tips of the index fingers. The first notes are so soft that the audience may not even hear them. Kraft said that when he took the commission he knew that the concerto would follow a quiet piece by Delius in its first performance. He wanted to match that atmosphere. Inspired by jazz artist Lester Young, the first movement takes the form of a cadenza, and is excellent. Within the first several minutes of the concerto, I realized that this piece would be part of the canon 100 years from now. The movement’s gorgeous finale, with its melodic percussion and strings and chimes raining starlight was both engaging and fascinating. The second movement, quiet and contemplative, filled with portamenti in the strings, revealed the influence of Kraft's friend the film composer David Raskin. The third movement, titled Fleeting, opens explosively with timpani and chimes in a percussive discussion. After an amazing jazzy solo on the timpani with keening strings and pizzicatti, the orchestra crescendos into a spectacular close. Listeners greeted the soloist like one of history’s great pianists, as they leapt to their feet with a roar. The audience and performers were so carried away with applause that they almost forgot about the composer. Finally, Kraft came up onto the stage in triumph.


The film composer Leonard Rosenman was also one of William Kraft’s close friends. Rosenman came to write the score for Rebel Without a Cause, through his friend and student, the actor James Dean. The suite from the score opened with the main title sequence, an evocative melody commanding large orchestral forces. The Love Theme conjured sadness and longing, the Knife Fight recalled Bernstein's West Side Story characterized by cymbal taps and rhythm. The finale recaps the themes from the earlier movements into a kind of symphonic form, rendering the whole compelling as a suite of music. This performance, subsequent to the other film inspired music of the festival, brought the realization that the repertoire of Hollywood music is massive. Neither this festival, nor last years American Composer’s Festival has even begun to approach the genre’s full breadth and depth.


The final piece of the evening, John Adams’ Violin Concerto, The Dharma at Big Sur, was yet another revelation. The world premier of the concerto with the soloist Tracy Silverman for the opening of Disney Hall in 2003 was an enigmatic disappointment. At the time, I was not sure whether there problems, or whether it was just over my head. Apparently, there were technical difficulties with the amplification in the hall for the premier. This performance with Leila Josefowicz made it clear that the concerto is a monument to the music of our time. Part 1: A New Day begins with the music of dawn, the keening violin a of 21st century response to Grieg’s "Morning" from Peer Gynt suite. Josefowicz was astounding. Other great violinists need to take this piece on. Where is Nigel Kennedy? Although there is a strange balance and focus due the amplification, the speakers and the electric violin, the raga-like music is glorious. There are moments of Ingram Marshall and Debussy. At times playful, in passages serious, with trills that alternately accelerate and slow down, the concerto moves from rock to the baroque over heartbeats. A slow crescendo across the orchestra leads to a climactic end like stars falling from a flowering tree, crowning some of the greatest music that the West Coast has produced.


Another eye-popping performance took place late on the evening of December 4 at Disney Hall, with the much-admired LA-based Calder Quartet and the young Los Angeles indie rock band called The Airborne Toxic Event. The crowd was far younger, hipper, and less well heeled. The room was packed and totally impassioned. The charismatic Airborne Toxic Event had just returned from a long and successful world tour, and was welcomed home by ecstatic fans. The Calder's opened with a feverish, white hot and amplified movement from the Ravel Quartet. It was a shockingly good opening to an indie rock concert in Disney Hall.


But regardless of Airborne’s popularity and ecstatic fan base, there are many California Indie rock bands. This particular band was probably invited into Disney Hall as part of this festival due to their fascinating and ongoing relationship with the Calder Quartet. The bans classy female violinist Anna Bulbrook happens to be the sister of the Calder Quartet violinist, Andrew Bulbrook. The rock band and the quartet’s joint appearances on the American late night talk shows have made them all You Tube celebrities, of a sort. All in all, the evening was entirely charming and exhilarating, even for someone who listens to string quartets far more than rock bands. If there was any evening in this festival that successfully pointed forward toward a future without boundaries between pop and classical, this was it. There was a definitely youthful, even adolescent quality to the attraction of Airborne’s rock. But they were completely authentic, not at all merely hipster poseurs. Although I am sure that much of the audience would have loved to see them naked, they were not just peddling the “Emperor’s New Clothes.”


The night before, on December 3, the Kronos Quartet joined the LA Philharmonic for a concert that was originally to be conducted by Leonard Slatkin, who bowed out due to illness. John Adams conducted the two contemporary pieces on the program and Jayce Ogren conducted the two 20th-century film oriented compositions. Leonard Slatkin originally commissioned the first two pieces, Jerry Goldsmith's Music for Orchestra from 1970 and the 2006 Liquid Interface by the young composer Mason Bates, who was just appointed Composer-in-Residence at the Chicago Symphony under Ricardo Muti. Slatkin also recorded the Tristan und Isolde, Fantasie for Violin, Piano, and Orchestra adapted by Franz Waxman from Richard Wagner's opera.


Goldsmith's Music for Orchestra seemed a musical ancestor to John Adams City Noir, an anxiously dramatic urban tone poem, pushing the edge of tonality, constantly seeking and extremely compelling. This film-oriented music emphasized the overlap and shared interest with the Pacific Symphony’s American Composers Festival last season that focused on Hollywood film music. That festival commissioned James Newton Howard, where this festival commissioned Thomas Newman. But regardless of the overlap, in classically Californian style the two festivals seem to exist in splendid isolation from one another. The film and concert composer Paul Chihara, who was central the American Composers Festival, was conspicuously absent from the West Coast, Left Coast series, particularly given his previous association with the LA Philharmonic. While the contemporary film oriented compositions in this season’s festival were all interesting and successful, none of them were as compelling as Chihara’s concert music.


While not at all film music, Mason Bates Liquid Interface opened with an electronic component that that was seamlessly integrated into the orchestral texture. John Adams conducting was poised and effortless. Bates himself performed the electronica on his Macintosh, as just another instrumentalist in the orchestra. This electronic composition was ideally suited to the concert hall, not at all an orphan from a nightclub. The piece is aptly named, being a kind of futuristic water music. The opening movement entitled Glaciers Calving, uses recorded sounds from Antarctica. The second movement, Scherzo Liquido, uses electronic water sounds, reminiscent of the sounds that the composer Tan Dun makes with actual water. The third movement, Crescent City, evokes a whisper of New Orleans jazz. The finale, inspired by Bates residence near Lake Wannsee in Berlin, dances with a be-bop rhythm of wind and water. The composition was superior and far more accessible than the electric guitar concerto by Mike Einziger that opened the festival.


The Tristan und Isolde Fantasy was essentially an arrangement of themes from Wagner’s music as a duo concerto for violin and piano. It seemed an ancestor of the Korngold Violin Concerto and a cousin of Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll. The young conductor Jayce Ogren offered fluid direction, and the violinist Bing Wang and pianist Joanne Pierce Martin were suitably lush and romantic.


The evening’s important premiere was the orchestral version of Philharmonic’s commission for Thomas Newman and the Kronos Quartet, It Got Dark. The first movement was enormously moody, with viscerally evocative percussion and the recorded sound of birds. The piece is divided into eight sections with vivid, pictorial titles, including Glitter Mollusk, Flying Fish and Crystal Plunge. The second movement is concerto for amplified string quartet in a minor key, with an evocatively scratchy old recorded voice taking us back to an older time. The third movement features an outsized hunting horn chorale and the violin bouncing wildly to a tambourine. Later, a lilting wistful string serenade foregrounds the quartet more forcefully. Then the sound of flying fish slapping the water is overtaken by an old lady’s recorded voice, as if from the eerie score to an HBO film. The piece was intriguing, but not so much that I need to hear it again soon.


The Green Umbrella Concert with the LA Philharmonic New Music Group on the first of December featured another evening with the Kronos Quartet and John Adams. The opening piece, Fog Tropes by Ingram Marshall, offered a blend of recorded San Francisco Bay foghorns and brass, composed in Northern California for a concert series that Adams curated for the San Francisco Symphony in 1981. This portrayal of the natural world and environment brought to mind a contemporary variation on Strauss's Alpine Symphony or Mahler's depictions of nature. The recorded sounds of seagulls felt out of place, but overall the composition was effective. The maverick 20th century composer Harry Partch made an important contribution to the history of music in California. But his piece U.S. Highball: A Musical Account of Slim’s Transcontinental Hobo Trip, arranged by Ben Johnson, was hard to take, like some of the obscure Cantos of Ezra Pound. Vocalist David Barron offered an authentic performance of the vocal part, but the whole was just too much time on a train, travelling through a wasteland.


The great discovery of the evening was the orchestral music of Frank Zappa. Titled The Yellow Shark, Zappa recorded the suite of orchestral music with the Ensemble Modern. The wacky titles of the individual sections were vintage Zappa: “Dog Breath Variations,” “The Girl In The Magnesium Dress,” and “G. Spot Tornado,” among others. The first piece was brightly orchestral, light and attractive. The second was more thorny and anxious, moving towards pop and jazz. The last piece let fall an avalanche of percussion, splashing and sparkling, with accelerating rhythms like Copland. Zappa seemed the bridge from Copland to Adams. The conductor visibly adored the music, playing the last selection again, as an encore.


Gustavo Dudamel’s contribution was also a festival pinnacle, another musical triumph. Dudamel conducted the Philharmonic in Esa Pekka Salonen’s LA Variations, composed by the Philharmonic’s former music director in Los Angeles in 1996. It marked a turning point in Salonen’s career, punctuating the moment that he truly went native Californian. He recorded the piece with the Philharmonic and made it one of their signatures. The variations are spectacular and it was fascinating to hear them under that powerful new baton. It was too bad that the composer was not there to hear his young colleague’s strikingly different interpretation.


The Lou Harrison Piano Concerto, performed by the Italian contemporary music specialist, Marino Formenti, is shockingly under-programmed. Formenti and Dudamel demonstrated undeniably that the Concerto should be a standard part of the repertoire. The piece is modern, strong, completely approachable and not as peculiar as one would expect. The composition is firmly part of the tradition of modern piano concertos, and should be done often in Paris and Vienna. Leif Ove Andnes should perform it in London with an Italian conductor.


John Adams’ City Noir, the climax of the evening and the great contribution of this festival to the repertoire, is a great piece of contemporary music, perhaps the best 21st century symphony yet composed. Immensely approachable but emotionally profound, its language is exactly as Adams described it, cinematic music that is not cut short by the plot. Composed for this festival and commissioned by the LA Philharmonic the piece is dedicated to the Philharmonic President, Deborah Borda. Inspiring, thrilling, this jazz and film inflected symphony is one of the most infectious and inspiring new compositions I have ever experienced. I wanted to offer a subtitle: “Unquiet City.”


The Los Angeles Master Chorale’s contribution to the festival, a concert entitled: "Composers from the Left Coast" was also much focused on the local scene. Admiration for the Master Chorale has grown by leaps and bounds over the last several years. Music Director Grant Gershon has trained choristers who truly listen to one another. Their flexibility and virtuosity is now remarkable. This particular program was not one of the best of the festival, nor was it one of the best Master Chorale concerts. But it clearly demonstrated the strength of the Chorale's history and contribution to music in Los Angeles. All four of the composers whose music was performed were in the room that night. One of the pieces, Midwinter Songs by Morton Lauridsen, has been performed by all four of the conductors who have led the chorus throughout its history. A local luminary, this important composer teaches at the University of Southern California. This song cycle is one of his better-known compositions. Even so, I believe he has done other pieces that are superior.


The LA premiere of Savage Altars by Ingram Marshall was intriguing but disappointing. The savagery of the music did not live up the text from Tacitus depicting a story of ancient Roman brutality. The electronic component of the composition was not as well integrated or effective as it was in Ingram's earlier piece, Fog Tropes. Cloudburst, by the young composer Eric Whitacre, was the surprise charmer of the evening. The piece employed atmospheric musical effects with great success, and yet was not merely flashy.


Unfortunately the popular composition A Map of Los Angeles, by local musical theater composer David O, was not as effective. The music was superficially attractive but without depth. It pales before Esa Pekka Salonen’s LA Variations. I enjoyed the gimmick of the chorus dancing in place, but overall I doubt that the piece will ever need to be performed outside of Los Angeles. The instrumental soloists Lisa Edwards, in the Morton Lauridsen and Sergio “Checo” Alonso on the Mexican harp in the David O, both performed admirably.


The opening performance of the festival, sort of a contemporary classical rock Marathon called "Eureka!" began at 9:30 and went on past midnight on a Friday night, November 21. The confusing program notes listed the Kronos Quartet, Terry Riley on the organ, the San Francisco electronics duo called Matmos and the impressive young rock composer and electric guitarist Michael Einziger from the group Incubus. The program itself was not listed, but the names of some of the pieces performed were buried in the bios of the performers. The concert opened with the premier of the quartet version of Thomas Newman’s It Got Dark. The evening was beyond daring, but involved a number of missed signals and overall was something of a mistake. There was definitely a feeling of the “Emperor's New Clothes”—a lot of attitude and posturing and not enough substance. Much of the performance, particularly Michael Einziger as well as Matmos definitely belong in a club, not in Disney Hall. By the time the sublime Terry Riley took the helm of the Disney Hall organ (he has christened it “Hurricane Mama”), much of the audience was ready to leave. But if you don’t take a risk, you can’t win.


All in all, the West Coast, Left Coast Festival won big, and John Adams, Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Philharmonic are set to push the musical edge of the continent even more spectacularly into the future.



Thomas Aujero Small

 

 

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