Two by Americans

Manhattan concert audiences last week heard fine performances of two unusual compositions that were widely different in style but unmistakably American in origin.

P: The Orchestra of America, founded two years ago to perform nothing but American music, presented the world premiere of Robert Kurka's Concerto for Marimba. Composer Kurka, Chicago-born son of Czech parents, went to work on his 22-minute concerto in 1956 at the suggestion of Marimbist Vida Chenoweth. completed the piece a year before his death of leukemia in 1957 at 35. Last week's performance, conducted by Richard Korn, featured Marimbist Chenoweth as soloist. A small woman (5 ft. 2 in.), she seemed dwarfed by her instrument--a 6-ft. tablelike frame supporting a graduated series of hardwood strips with a row of tubular resonators attached. But when she started to flail away with both wool and rubber-tipped mallets, Marimbist Chenoweth proved herself a virtuoso. Scampering from one end of the instrument to the other, she produced flurries of bell-like tones in a surprising dynamic range. As for the piece itself, it proved to be tuneful, crisply rhythmic, shot through with jazz echoes and a spirit of jaunty sophistication. It proved again that Composer Kurka had one of the most promising original talents in U.S. music.

P: The New York Philharmonic under Guest Conductor Thomas Schippers presented Samuel Barber's rarely performed Knoxville: Summer of 1915, set to the prose poem by James Agee, novelist and film critic who died in 1955. Conductor Schippers provided a well-balanced performance, nicely graduated to Soprano Leontyne Price's clear and controlled reading of the text. If the piece itself had a weakness, it was the tendency to overly luxuriant melody, at odds with the simplicity and the subtle rhythm of the language. Example: the line "he has coiled the hose'' had Soprano Price soaring dramatically over a pointlessly billowing sheen of strings. Barber's Knoxville was at its best when it was least pretentious, matching with quiet lyricism Agee's poetic vision of a remote summer evening in the South: ''The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine . . ."

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