A 20-Year Ongoing Experiment

The creation of the New Music Group in 1981 was a bold idea for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. But it wasn’t that bold. A new sense of adventure entered into life of the American symphony orchestra in the ‘80s. The New York Philharmonic initiated an annual festival of new music. The Boston Symphony had its new music ensemble. And many orchestras around the country supported an active composer-in-residence program.

All that is now ancient history, all but the New Music Group. What is truly remarkable about the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s venture is that it wasn’t a brief experiment. The New Music Group has survived changing administrations and budget crises, and in the process it has become part of what defines the feisty spirit of the Philharmonic.

Tuesday night at the Colburn School for the Arts, the New Music Group celebrated its 20th anniversary in a special concert in the Green Umbrella series--the Philharmonic’s new music concert series. Under a rafter hung with green umbrellas and with Zipper Hall bathed in green light, the four composers who have been most closely associated with the New Music Group--William Kraft, John Harbison, Steven Stucky and Esa-Pekka Salonen--came together to conduct their own works.

The evening served as a well-deserved tribute to Ernest Fleischmann, the former general manager of the Philharmonic who founded the New Music Group and then refused to let it die, no matter what the budget demanded. It further honored board members, such as Robert Attiyeh and William Brady, who have spent their own money to commission works, as has new music patron Betty Freeman. In fact, so strong is the belief in the worth of this enterprise that Salonen, Fleischmann and the current general manager, Deborah Borda, recently made personal donations when the New Music Group was threatened again by a budget crunch.

But the main purpose of Tuesday’s program was to do what the New Music Group regularly does, which is to give an interesting and relevant concert.

In his address to the audience, Salonen described the group as a landing pod for the orchestral mother ship, dropping in on other planets and “making the first contact with alien life-forms.”

On this occasion the musical life-forms, and certainly the well-known four composers, were hardly alien. The Double Trio, by Kraft, the first director of the New Music Group, was the earliest work, premiered 35 years ago at the Monday Evening Concerts. The piece represents musical issues of the ‘60s, about pitches and rhythms as mathematical sets, but it is also the music of a virtuoso percussionist with a lively imagination, an irrepressible rhythmic energy and a theatrical bent.

Fascinating sounds percolate from a strange ensemble of two pianos (one prepared), electric guitar, tuba and percussion. A Lisztian cadenza for prepared piano (written for Michael Tilson Thomas and played here with fine flourish by guest pianist Jeremy Haladyna) is the kind of gesture that brings a smile to the face.

The character of Harbison’s Concerto for Oboe, Clarinet and Strings (1984) is Baroque music brought up to date; it gives the sensation of a bewigged couple arguing about events of our day. Oboist Marion Arthur Kuszyk and clarinetist David Howard were superb as the nattering soloists, their melodic lines full of intertwining fantasy, with the string ensemble attempting, rarely with success, to calm them down.

Stucky’s “Etudes,” for recorder and chamber orchestra, was a new piece receiving its U.S. premiere, and the soloist was Danish recorder player Michala Petri. The brief “etudes”--one for sopranino recorder as chirpy as Vivaldi, another full of floating Berio-like sonorities, a third full of rushing scales and jazzy syncopations--are irresistible studies in good cheer. Petri is a marvel in the amount of expression she can achieve from a sonically primitive Baroque instrument, and Stucky’s ear for color and nuance, as well as the ever engaging vivacity of his music, perked up to all the possibilities she presented him.

Salonen’s contribution was his song cycle “Five Images After Sappho.” Laura Claycomb, the soprano who premiered the work at the Ojai Festival in 1999 and sang it with the Philharmonic the following year at Royce Hall, was, once more, that soloist. This short visit into the inner life of a young girl’s awakening sexuality is an example of the dazzling new personality that has entered into Salonen’s music in recent years. And it now proudly and happily takes its place among the vast list of new works that the New Music Group has performed over 20 seasons.

That list--taking up five pages of double columns in small type in the program--is a monument. The music is not the usual snapshot of our era that you get from other orchestras, but a hard, deep and astonishingly thorough look at our life and times.