Custom Concerts

In the smoky recesses of a Manhattan cellar known as the Village Gate, Folk Singer Josh White was strumming Scarlet Ribbons and Saint James Infirmary. Uptown, at the 92nd Street Y.M.-Y.W.H.A., a group known as the Tichman Trio (clarinet, cello and piano) was threading its agile way through the chamber music of Beethoven and Brahms. Between the two --and a couple of blocks east of Carnegie Hall, where the Boston Symphony was unfolding Gustav Mahler's massive Symphony No. i--choir and soloists at St. Bartholomew's Church on Park Avenue were launching into Beethoven's stately Missa Solemnis.

It was a weekday night in Manhattan --the kind that crops up regularly during the busy, rewarding seven months (October through April) of New York's music season. Probably no city in the world offers so great a volume or variety of music, although the fact is sometimes obscured in the blasts of publicity for a few glamour names. Performing groups range from the distinguished, amateur Dessoff Choir, specializing in a cappella Renaissance music, to the new, still uneven Contemporary Baroque Ensemble. Some attractions on display in the last fortnight:

P: The two-year-old Orchestra of America, under Conductor Richard Korn at Carnegie Hall, presented a program of the kind of music it was founded to perform--little-known works by American composers. John Knowles Paine's Overture to "As You Like It" and Howard Hanson's Lux Aeterna proved merely to be pleasantly melodic, soundly constructed works with undistinguished profiles. Leon Kirchner's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra belonged to the crash-bang-and-meander school of modernism, with the violins chasing random single notes in sequence while the cello stuttered insistently, as if trying to interrupt. The whole was something less than the sum of its brilliant parts. Pleasant surprises of the evening were Frederick Jacobi's Yeibichai: Variations for Orchestra on an American Indian Theme, which employed some interestingly experimental orchestral effects, and Lamar Stringfield's Symphonic Ballad, "The Legend of John Henry," which used the traditional folk song ("John Henry said to his captain, 'A man ain't nothing but a man' ") in a skillful series of fragments, developed after the course of the legendary hero's life.

P: Conductor Newell Jenkins' Clarion Concerts, which for two years have made a distinguished name by searching out musical curiosa, in a Town Hall concert featured Alessandro Scarlatti's rarely performed oratorio, II Martirio di Sant' Orsola. An unpretentious work, it had little true dramatic tension but was supported by a vocal latticework of wonderful warmth, tenderness and transparency. Elsewhere on the program. Conductor Jenkins exhumed a wonderfully flourishing Trumpet Suite by 17th century English Composer Jeremiah Clarke, and played Mexican Composer Carlos Chavez' Symphony No. 5, a propulsively rhythmic work for strings that ran hard and relentlessly but with no more effect than a man on a musical treadmill.

P: The Music-in-the-Making series, now in its eighth season, presented a concert at Cooper Union featuring the works of Dika Newlin. Andrew Imbrie, Teo Macero, Wayne Barlow and Richard Arnell. Best of the lot were Composer Macero's Polaris, a virtuoso piece for French horn and orchestra, which gives the horn a chance to indulge in all the odd wiggles, slides and quirks it is capable of, and Arnell's Concerto Capriccioso, marked by rich string harmonies and a delicate interplay between the solo violin and the winds. Privately financed, the Music-in-the-Making concerts feature question periods during which the audience is invited to quiz the composers. Asked one listener after hearing Polaris: "Was this work written for or against the French horn?"

P: The Composers' Showcase at Greenwich Village's Circle in the Square presented six representative works by 55-year-old Italian Composer Luigi Dallapiccola, a visiting professor at New York City's Queens College and one of the best of contemporary twelve-tone composers. The works included his Two Studies for Violin and Piano, Five Fragments by Sappho for Soprano and Chamber Orchestra, Five Songs for Baritone. Most of the music was in Dallapiccola's characteristic style--lyrical but contorted, warmer than the twelve-tone music of the Viennese School, expert in its blending of small instrumental combinations with the solo voice. Swedish Soprano Elisabeth Soeder-stroem sang the Five Fragments with clarity and elegance. Another standout: the second of the Two Studies, a vigorous fugue studded with complex but exhilarating technical tricks.

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