Moderns at Work

New music is enjoying a booming season. Audiences have a chance to shop among dozens of new works, many by well-known U.S. composers, some by composers seldom before in the public eye or ear. Some of the successes and more ambitious failures:

P: A 45-minute operatic treatment of Honore de Balzac's spine-tingler La Grande Breteche, with music by California-born Stanley Hollingsworth, 32, pupil and protege of Gian Carlo Menotti. Commissioned by the NBC Opera Company, Breteche closely follows the Balzac tale--a bedroom farce given the Grand Guignol treatment-- about a wife who hastily conceals her lover in a closet, swears to her husband there is no one there, and then stands by in helpless horror as the husband has the closet bricked up. While much of the original's strength derived from the calm, understated manner in which Balzac unfolded it, the operatic version staggers forward in a spasmodic series of contrived musical climaxes held together by a score that is pleasant, tuneful but inherently undramatic.

P: A 20-minute symphonic poem by Chicago-born Pulitzer Prizewinning Composer Ernst Bacon, 58, with narration based on Paul Horgan's Pulitzer Prizewinning book Great River: The Rio Grande. Commissioned two years ago by the Dallas Symphony and performed under Walter Hendl, Rio Grande proved to be a collection of twelve thematic snippets--A River Created, Desert and Canyon: Texas-Mexico. Soldiers by Firelight--celebrating the river's history and lurid scenery. Composer Bacon's music, liberally scored for piano, vibraphone and harp, illuminates the text and is occasionally brilliantly evocative, e.g., in the tiny, clear sounds of the orchestra accompanying the words "The evening star hung like a drop of water in the sky" following an Indian rain dance. In other sections the music is fragmented by the necessities of text and sounds merely like a bland movie sound track.

P: Symphony No. 1, by Philadelphia-born Pianist Leo Smit, 36, performed by the Boston Symphony under Charles Munch. The work, which was four years in the writing, is solidly constructed and pricked by a series of adroit, Stravinsky-like dislocations of rhythm. The strings are almost continually and often trickily active --so much so that they tend to drown out the detail of other instruments and blur the musical ideas.

P: Jekyll and Hyde Variations, by Morton Gould, premiered by the New York Philharmonic. The piece, consisting of a theme and 13 variations, wittily--if obviously--evokes the opposing moods of the Stevenson story with calm, melodic passages alternating with turbulent climaxes. In an epilogue of glib, quiet harmonies, Gould mirrors the release through death of Stevenson's tortured hero.

P: An 18-minute, four-part symphonic jazz suite by veteran Jazzman Lionel Hampton, 41, entitled King David and premiered under Dimitri Mitropoulos in Manhattan's Town Hall. Inspired and flavored by Hampton's recent tours of Israel ("I visited King David's tomb, and a chant just came to me"), the music tells in a plaintive harp opening of the Old Testament tribulations of the Jews, "blows down the Wailing Wall" in a mighty, jumping blast of brass, moves through a lively vibraphone dance to a deafening, full-orchestra crescendo of triumph.

P: The Poet's Requiem, by Ned Rorem, 33, premiered in Manhattan by the American Concert Choir and Orchestra. The Requiem, a dissertation on death, uses lines from such as Kafka, Rilke, Cocteau, Freud and Gide, weaving them into a melodic, bright-textured, intermittently impressionistic and generally successful score. Although most of the words are set to music to be sung, Rorem has Freud speak through a narrator: "Our own death is unimaginable, and when we try to imagine it, we perceive that we really survive as spectators ... In the unconscious, every one of us is convinced of his own immortality."

P: Dancer Francisco Moncion's first ballet, Pastorale, presented by the New York City Ballet, and British Choreographer Kenneth MacMillan's Winter's Eve, given its U.S. premiere by the American Ballet Theater. Both ballets have blindness as their theme. Choreographically more mature and more daring, MacMillan's ballet describes how a blind girl falls in love with a young man, pretends that she can see, and in the end inadvertently blinds him. The relentlessly cruel theme is unfolded in choreography that is occasionally brilliant but never properly sustained. Pastorale briefly (25 minutes) and simply tells the tale of a blind man (danced by Moncion) who tries to win a pretty girl (Allegra Kent), succeeds for a time, but finally loses her to a former lover. It is essentially a single languorous dance that avoids banality by keeping the girls almost continuously on point. Dancer Moncion, 35, scored a choreographic triumph of sorts by designing figures and lifts that would not be impossible for a blind man, e.g., the girl moves within reach of his groping finger tips, and there are none of the usual running leaps of the girl into her partner's arms. Otherwise, the choreography expresses little beyond a nostalgic pastoral flavor, lacks the full vitality of U.S. Composer Charles Turner's alternately lyrical and turbulent score.

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