Losing Friends & Winning Fans

Composers are as jealous as prima donnas, says American Symphonist Benjamin Lees, 44. "You can have lots of them for friends as long as your music isn't being performed more than theirs." So popular is his music these days at concerts of the Chicago, Cleveland and Detroit symphonies and a host of lesser orchestras, that Lees runs the risk of never again getting a friend ly greeting from any of his colleagues.

Last week in Boston, he demonstrated with his new Piano Concerto No. 2 why it is that conductors, soloists and the public have only the kindest of words for him. He is not afraid of melo dy or tonality, and he has the courage to write in the familiar mainstream tra dition of Bartok and Prokofiev--the titters of twelve-tone, modified twelve-tone, post-Webern and electronic cliques notwithstanding. That is not to say he is old hat. Within the bounds of con ventional forms like the symphony, sonata, string quartet and concerto, Lees manages to be fascinatingly original and thoroughly contemporary.

What gives his music its special character is its aura of the fantastic and diabolical. Lees himself traces his fond ness for surprise and mysterious change of mood to the Dadaists and to surrealists like Duchamp, Max Ernst and Man Ray, whose works he got to know during his days in Paris from 1954 to 1962. "Surrealism is representational but in a disturbing way," says Lees. "It reminds you of a dream. This is the element I have tried to transform into music."

The Second Concerto proves how well he has succeeded. Compounded of powerful short phrases, punchy accents and a kaleidoscopic array of rhythms, it motors through three movements and 22 minutes like an Orpheus in the underworld. The brilliant dialogue achieved by American Pianist Gary Graffman and Erich Leinsdorf's Boston Symphony showed that the trip was definitely worth the effort. "The simple fact," said Graffman, "is that Ben has written a major piano concerto, which extremely few people have done in the second half of the 20th century." With their hearty applause, Boston's audience agreed.

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