New Star

The gaudy fanfares for the occasion were by Paul Hindemith and Albert Roussel, and new works by some of the most glittering names in contemporary music were getting a first hearing. But in the second week of a five-week-long festival dedicating the University of California's $2,200,000 music center at Berkeley, the most exciting sounds came from a comparative unknown: Manhattan-born Composer Andrew Imbrie, 37.

Tapestry of Sound. Imbrie's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra shone in a galaxy of impressive premieres: Ernest Bloch's Quintet No. 2 for Piano and Strings, a vigorous, passionate work whose rich coloration took on a special sheen in the sonically clean, echoless hall; Darius Milhaud's Eighth Symphony, describing the flow of the Rhone to the sea, which happily combined the gusty exuberance of the Frenchman's early works with the sunny lyricism of his later ones; Roger Sessions' serene, atmospheric Quintet with Two Violas, performed without its third movement, which the composer was unable to complete by festival time.

Slim, tweedy Composer Imbrie worked intermittently on his concerto for four years, completed it in 1954. As performed last week by the San Francisco Symphony, with Robert Gross as violin soloist, it proved to be a propulsive, clamorous virtuoso work in both twelve-tone and traditional diatonic idioms, with its limber solo line woven through the big sonorities of the orchestra in a stirringly unfolding tapestry of sound. The first movement, in alternating slow and fast tempi, built to its main climax by echoing the solo violin nights with orchestral figurations set at closer and closer intervals. By turns, the second movement was complex and agitated, waltzlike and melodic, with muted violins and then muted trumpets repeating the soloist's refrainlike theme. The third movement opened with rich orchestral tone clusters, built to a brilliantly frenzied solo violin flight near the close. The 700 concertgoers called Conductor Enrique Jorda and Soloist Gross back for half a dozen bows, twice drew Imbrie from his seat in the audience.

Best Since Berg. Composer Imbrie grew up in Princeton, N.J., started playing the piano when he was four. As a Princeton University undergraduate, he studied composition with Roger Sessions, won the New York Music Critics' Circle Award in 1944 for his String Quartet in B Flat. He followed Sessions in 1946 to Berkeley, where he got his M.A. With three years out for work in Rome on a Prix de Rome and later a Guggenheim fellowship, he has taught at the University of California ever since.

He lives with his wife in a wood-and-glass, stilt-supported house in Berkeley, composes in a studio tucked below next to the garage. When he wrote his ambitious concerto, he had scant hope that it would be played, but went ahead anyway because "I wanted to express everything I could." His "everything" proved to be quite enough for the critics. Wrote the San Francisco Chronicle's Alfred Frankenstein : "If it is all a total failure, the festival will nevertheless have been justified because it occasioned the first performance of Andrew Imbrie's Violin Concerto. It impressed me as being the most important composition of its kind since the Violin Concerto of Alban Berg."

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