Generosity of spirit at LACMA

On Monday, with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the news after the announcement of Director Andrea L. Rich’s sudden resignation, no one really expected beleaguered administrators and board members to show interest in one of the museum’s new music concerts in the Bing Theater. They never show up at these concerts anyway.

And that’s too bad, because something was on display Monday evening that laconic LACMA-ites are seldom credited with: constancy and devotion. The concert was by Xtet, a gracious and audacious 10-member ensemble that’s been appearing at the museum for 19 years.

The program acknowledged Dorrance Stalvey, who’s been doggedly keeping the music programs going for 33 years, by playing one of his works in honor of his 75th birthday. And Xtet, with a show of tremendous pleasure, turned over part of the evening to one of its own: Daisietta Kim, a soprano who, with quiet authority, has a way of becoming one with the music she sings.

My colleague Christopher Knight bemoans the fact that LACMA has not, for the last 10 years, been run by an art professional. Well, its music program has been, and by someone with a generosity of spirit, no less. Some complain of Stalvey’s lack of panache, but if he happens to be a composer with an unfashionable modernist bent, he uses his position to foster a range of music.

His own, as in “Pound Songs” from 1985, heard Monday, is written in the abstract, atonal language of the ‘50s and ‘60s. But how well that serves five poems by Ezra Pound. With Kim as soloist and a six-member ensemble conducted by Donald Crockett, Stalvey’s songs gave Pound’s words a new resonance.

Stalvey elongates the syllables, lets them hang. The ensemble swirls and rings behind the singer, colors muted. Kim delivered Pound’s texts with a sense of awe for tone and word. Crockett coaxed dignified playing from outstanding musicians, alert to the idea that the songs explore things often unspoken, Pound’s (and LACMA’s) “turmoil grown visible beneath our peace.”

Kim’s “Windup,” which ended a program also containing short pieces by Pierre Jalbert and Edmund Campion, sought that peace from inner turmoil. With the help of a dancer (Lisa K. Lock), an offstage voice (John Steinmetz), two pianists (Vicki Ray and Gloria Cheng) and some projections of Kandinsky and Modernist architecture, Kim separated out the many aspects of her talent.

She happens to be a good dancer, a decent pianist, a fine actress. Offstage narration explained the forces that had worked on her as a young musician to keep her in her place. (You expect a big career with a small voice?) Lock was alternately tormentor and loyal pet.

Music came in snippets. At 54, Kim’s voice is not as pure as it once was, but she still has a way with Schubert. This coming-out party included her playing Mozart four-hand with Ray and dancing wildly with Lock to excerpts from “The Rite of Spring.” Let her return now to song.

Jalbert’s “Visual Abstract,” for a chamber ensemble, and Campion’s “A Complete Wealth of Time,” for two pianos, have in common a love for lingering reverberations and the urge to dance. Campion gives us Pound’s “overflowing river ... run mad,” and Ray and Cheng made it a knockout.