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The Ultimate Green Umbrella

Los Angeles
Walt Disney Concert Hall
04/07/2009 -  
Enrico Chapela: Li Po (World Premiere, LAPA commission)
Anna Clyne: Within Her Arms (World Premiere, LAPA commission)
Erin Gee: Mouthpiece XI (World Premiere, LAPA commission)
Fang Man: Deluge (World Premiere, LAPA commission)
Esa-Pekka Salonen: Floof

Anna Clyne (vocals), Hila Plitmann (Soprano)
Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group, Esa-Pekka Salonen (Conductor)


Esa-Pekka Salonen (© Mathew Imaging)


Tonight’s concert, one of several dramatic peaks to Esa-Pekka Salonen’s final season as Music Director of the LA Philharmonic, perfectly represents the tradition of innovation that he has cultivated. Discovered and launched by the great Ernest Fleischman, the Philharmonic’s former General Manager, and then joined by the indomitable Debora Borda, who took over as President, Esa-Pekka has had an incredible career here in Los Angeles. Both Salonen and the Philharmonic have made the Green Umbrella New Music concerts a signature series of events. Soon, as more of a free agent with greater independence, he will have the opportunity for greater focus on himself and on composition. If he continues the level of activity and accomplishment that he has attained here in LA, who knows what he will achieve.


All the critics from Southern California, those from the New Yorker and the New York Times, and even some from across the Atlantic were in attendance. The house was substantially full; the rest of Salonen’s final concerts are sold out. The first four pieces, all world premieres commissioned by the LA Philharmonic, were audacious and diverse but surprisingly approachable. The composer Steven Stucky, who is also completing a distinguished tenure in residence with the Philharmonic and the Green Umbrella new music series, discovered the young composers and curated the evening. Each of the premieres was striking in its way, but Salonen’s Floof, by now something of a contemporary classic, was as wild as any of them. Each of the composers and their compositions seemed gifted with a complex international origin and back-story.


Enrico Chapela is a Mexican composer who is now studying in Paris. His orchestral and electronic piece, Li Po, is based on a poem about the life of the great Chinese poet, by the Mexican poet José Juan Tablada. This tribute to a wandering poet drinking under a flowering tree with the moon as his companion brings Mahler’s "Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde" blazingly into the 21st century. Given Chapela’s bold, “maximalist” approach, this poetic world was as riveting as ever. In an intriguing convergence, the American composer Ben Johnston’s new song cycle The Tavern, for baritone and microtonal guitar, is based on almost the same subject matter.


The composer Anna Clyne, born in London and raised in the UK, now lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her elegant and poignant piece, Within Her Arms, was composed for string orchestra. At moments almost minimalist, at times a kind of serenade, the strings shifted through a series of lilting mysterious textures.


Erin Gee’s Mouthpiece XI was certainly one of the more outrageous of the night. The composer performed the vocals, as she does for other works in the Mouthpiece series. She was not slowed down an iota for having to perform from a wheel chair, due to having injured her feet. She alternated between two microphones to amplify two different types of sound that she vocalized. With skills that reminded me of the extraordinary “beatboxing” technique that has been developed by rappers, she made whistles, pops, clicks and plethora of remarkable effects. She sort of mechanized herself as a human instrument, and embedded those musical noises in a perfectly matched orchestral landscape. Having studied at the University of Iowa, she now resides in Austria and recently premiered an opera in Zurich.


Fang Man, a doctoral candidate who is studying with Steven Stucky at Cornell, was born in China and seems to be part of a tsunami of composers and musicians who are transforming and transcending the old barriers between Asian and Western music. A painting by Kandinsky, entitled Composition VI-Deluge, inspired her piece, also titled Deluge. She based the musical structure of her composition on the multi-centered visual form and colors of the Swiss painting. She also transformed an ancient Chinese piece, Flowing Water, into a melody for the harp. Esa-Pekka Salonen guided each of these pieces with utter confidence, even reaching toward the florid at moments.


Salonen’s own piece, Floof, “Songs of a Homestatic Homer”, enjoyed a stunning, even definitive performance. Coloratura soprano Hila Plitmann was a shrieking siren, who drew all of us crashing ecstatically down onto the rocks. Salonen and Plitmann, with the Philharmonic players behind them, blew the doors off Disney Hall. The amplified quintet of contrabass clarinet, cello, piano, synthesizer, and percussion brought the post-serial avant-guard right to edge of pop. Whimsical and savage, the work came out of the composer’s time with a group of his Finnish musical contemporaries, and was inspired by the Polish Science-fiction of Stanislaw Lem.



Thomas Aujero Small

 

 

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