Clowns under the Green Umbrella
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For its Green Umbrella program Tuesday night in Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group concentrated on four great postwar avant-garde composers who changed the language and techniques of music. They were John Cage, Luciano Berio, Karlheinz Stockhausen and György Ligeti. These were big personalities who took themselves quite seriously, and the program concentrated on some of their revolutionary innovations in works from the late ‘40s to the mid-’60s. But that didn’t stop the Philharmonic from sending in the clowns.
The program began with Berio’s “Sequenza V” for solo trombone. James Miller walked onstage dressed as the famous Swiss clown Grock. Berio described Oneglia, the provincial Italian town where he grew up, as little more than pasta and oil. But Grock lived nearby. He was a musical clown who played 24 instruments, and Berio remembered him in the score by asking the trombonist to strike various poses characteristic of an old showman. Like Grock, Berio also explored the intersection between voice and instrument, as he has the player sing into his mouthpiece.
Miller clowned to the hilt, all the while playing exceptionally challenging music. He caught the work’s antic spirit (it was written in 1965 in the Bay Area and reflected the time). Miller also brought out the melancholy that is famously at the heart of any great clown.
But ultimately Grock is the soul of “Sequenza V,” not the substance of it. Grock alluded to in music is a more touching clown than Grock personified. Musically, Miller’s performance was wonderful. He has the piece in his body and is now ready for the hardest act of all –- bringing Grock to life in white tie and tails.
Excerpts from Cage’s “Sonatas and Interludes” for prepared piano followed. These fastidiously fashioned miniatures -- with their colorful sounds produced by carefully fastening to the instrument nuts and bolts and other items from the hardware store –- were hailed as little short of a modern masterpiece when they premiered in Carnegie Hall in 1949. Not long after, Cage began using chance procedures, stretched the limits of music, and was often dismissed as the clown of contemporary music.
Cage, however, merely extended the borders of beauty, and turning the piano into a lovely percussion instrument was one step in the process. Tuesday’s pianist, Joanne Pearce Martin, balanced the new with the expected. Her prepared piano sounded closer to a straight piano than Cage may have intended, but she played with percussive drama. The first sonata was a little tentative. The last one, though, had the entrancing quality of bells suspended from the clouds.
By the end of his life, Stockhausen turned out to be the biggest composer clown of them all, thinking himself a missionary from an alien planet. Still, his musical vision started out vast and grew vaster. The New Music Group played the first work he acknowledged, “Kontra-Punkte,” dated 1953. Ten instruments begin and slowly peter out. A dozen minutes later, only the piano is left.
The score at the time appeared unperformable, so mathematically intricate are the rhythmic and dynamic details, and it is still thought the property of new music specialists with superhuman powers. Yet traditional orchestra musicians tackled it Tuesday. The conductor was Pablo Heras-Casado, a Spaniard in his early 30s and a protégé of Pierre Boulez.
The performance didn’t exactly sing; the players had the notes too much on their minds. But it was fine enough to give a sense of Stockhausen’s startling sonic arsenal, which here pierces the atmosphere with shards of sharp color. For a touch of theater, Heras-Casado had the players quietly leave the stage as their parts ended. The composer died a year ago, and this felt like a farewell gesture.
Ligeti appeared to play the clown in “Aventures” and “Nouvelles Aventures,” which ended the program. Three singers (Kiera Duffy, Mary Nessinger and Eugene Chan) made funny noises of the kind your kids do when theywant to annoy you. The seven instrumentalists weren’t shrinking sonic violets either.
The Hungarian composer, who knew the hardships imposed by the Nazis and the Communists before leaving his homeland in the late ‘50s, never fully lost his edge. These works were composed in the early ‘60s, and horror always seems around the corner. Whether to laugh or cry is not always clear. Heras-Casado did a superb job controlling the dramatic gestures and let the piece speak for itself, which meant tenderly, ultimately sending out the clowns.
-- Mark Swed
