Where the New Action Is

By Michael Walsh

A major opera premiere may draw international critical attention, but the real action in new music is found on the local front. After all, many more U.S. cities have orchestras than have opera companies, and the average music lover's exposure to contemporary music comes most often in the concert hall. A cluster of new works performed around the country this past month shows that a stylistic eclecticism is the rage in composition these days, with composers paying homage to sources as disparate as James Joyce, J.S. Bach, the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge.

Coincidentally, two pieces inspired by Joyce's last novel, Finnegans Wake, were premiered a week apart and had practically the same name. Toru Takemitsu's rippling Riverrun (1984) was given its first performance by Pianist Peter Serkin and the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Conductor Simon Rattle. Stephen Albert's ambitious RiverRun debuted at the Kennedy Center in Washington, under Conductor Mstislav Rostropovich with the National Symphony. In Manhattan, Violinist Gidon Kremer played the U.S. premiere of Soviet Composer Sofia Gubaidulina's knotty Offertorium with the New York Philharmonic, while across the East River, the Brooklyn Philharmonic presented the first indoor performance of Tobias Picker's frisky Keys to the City, written in 1983 to celebrate the Brooklyn Bridge's centenary. And Pittsburgh got the first hearing of Ned Rorem's rawboned An American Oratorio, performed by the Pittsburgh Symphony and the Mendelssohn Choir.

Of the five, Albert's 40-minute, four-movement symphony was the best, as much for what it represented as for its considerable technical accomplishment. A frank invocation of the spirits of Mahler, Stravinsky and Sibelius in its late romantic thematic materials, its grandiose orchestration and its heroic reach, RiverRun would probably have been laughed off the stage 20 years ago by Albert's colleagues as impossibly regressive. If anything, the grand-gestured RiverRun is not enough of a throwback, bashfully pulling back at crucial moments as though Albert, 43, did not fully trust his expansive instincts. The conservative spirit is scarcely limited to politics these days, and younger composers like Albert are finding new expressivity in harmonic language handed down from their grandfathers.

On the other hand, the concerto by Takemitsu, 54, is a delicate, elusive short piece in one movement that is more obviously Joycean in its free-flowing play of ideas. Hardly a bravura technical display, it is instead restrained; if Albert's River Liffey is sometimes a raging torrent, Takemitsu's is a gentle stream.

Gubaidulina's Offertorium (1979-80) uses the theme of Bach's Musical Offering as the takeoff point for a complex violin concerto that lasts about 35 minutes. Atonal passages mingle freely with tonal ones as the theme is atomized and then reconstructed in reverse; the modern orchestrational device of flutter-tonguing for flutes and brass is complemented by traditionally virtuosic writing for the solo violinist. Gubaidulina, 53, also evokes her Russian predecessors Stravinsky and Prokofiev, most strikingly in a passage of glissandi string harmonics that recalls The Firebird. By Western standards, Offertorium may be tame, but given the governmental restrictions on the stylistic range of Soviet music, it shows Gubaidulina to be a fresh, challenging voice in her country.

Picker's Keys to the City, his second piano concerto, is a sometimes freewheeling portrait of the great bridge, most effective when brimming with the high spirits of Brooklynites George Gershwin and Aaron Copland. Unfortunately, though, the bonhomie is only intermittent. Despite delightful incongruities, like a six-note boogie-woogie that unexpectedly breaks out of some dense noodling, too often the piece is aimless and unfocused when it should be straightforwardly celebratory. At 30, Picker has compiled an impressive list of awards and commissions and has written other large-scale works, including a symphony and a violin concerto. What he needs to do now is fix more surely his own point of view.

Rorem's new oratorio, based on texts by Poe, Longfellow, Twain, Crane, Melville, Whitman, Emma Lazarus and Sidney Lanier, is one of four premieres this season for the prolific composer, and it too treads familiar ground. Best known for his art songs and his candid, elegantly written diaries recounting his life and loves in Paris, New York and elsewhere, the composer, 61, has long been a conservative voice in American music. He speaks in a basically breezy 1940s tonality, which is leavened by a few more recent technical advances. In An American Oratorio, Rorem's style works effectively with gentle poems like Poe's To Helen, but it misses the force and majesty of Crane's bitter War Is Kind or Lazarus' noble ode to the Statue of Liberty, The New Colossus. The reach of the texts generally exceeds the composer's grasp. "The music was written in Nantucket during July of 1983," Rorem explains in a program note. "That July, as it happens, contained a houseful of guests; like 18th century female novelists, I was constrained to create on the sly." Too slyly, it appears. He should have sent the guests home.

If none of the new pieces proved, at first blush, a masterpiece, the important thing was that each was programmed, played and heard. New works are the fresh blood that keeps the art alive, and the duty of the present is to perform them. Posterity will take care of itself, as it always has.