61/4 - Shalini Vijayan and Lynn Vartan - Violin and Percussion

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Notes From the Underground
March Music Madness

Los Angeles Roars With
Contemporary Sounds
by Carl Byron

If the USC men's basketball team had performed as impressively in the NCAA tournament as the school's Thornton Contemporary Music Ensemble did in its Green Umbrella appearance at the Colburn School in the last week of March, the university would probably be celebrating a championship season. The USC student musicians, directed by eminent composer and music director Donald Crockett, were outstanding in readings of two daunting and utterly contrasting scores by contemporary composers, both inspired by the paintings of two of the masters of modern art.

The first half of the Green Umbrella program consisted of Louis Andriessen's "De Stijl," a 1985 composition that the Dutch composer intended, according to his own program notes, as a "musical image of Piet Mondrian's Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue from 1927, but exclusively on a conceptual basis." Andriessen evokes the most obvious characteristics of Mondrian's style--geometric design and primary colors--by setting gleaming pandiatonic harmonic structures, clanging sonorities and funky grooves for a very loud and brassy post-modern big band augmented by two pianos, synthesizer, electric guitars and bass and a generous assortment of percussion instruments. The piece also incorporates a quartet of (amplified) sopranos who chant intentionally indecipherable fragments of Schoenmaeker's "Principal of Visual Mathematics," along with an offstage upright piano (representing the Dutch painters love of boogie-woogie), and a speaker who strolls through the hall during the works central section intoning reminiscences of Mondrian.

The results could perhaps be compared to filtering Herbie Hancock's "Chameleon" through Stravinsky's "Symphony of Psalms," or vice-versa. Whatever one's feelings about Andriessen's aesthetics, the performance was well crafted and compelling. Crockett and his young players nearly rocked the roof off of Zipper Hall, and percussionist Lynn Vartan, costumed as a 1920s Parisian boulevardier in her role as the speaker, performed with a suitably detached worldliness.

Following the intermission, Crockett led a much smaller instrumental ensemble, consisting of viola, celesta and percussion, augmented by the USC Thornton Chamber Choir, in Morton Feldman's "Rothko Chapel." The results sounded as reflective and muted as "De Stijl" was brassy and garish. Feldman composed the work in 1971 as a tribute to the recently deceased Rothko, to be performed in the chapel the painter had designed for the Menil Foundation in Houston, where 14 of his large canvases hang.

Where Andriessen revels in sensory overload and frenzied rhythms, Feldman's work reveals a sparse, spectral soundscape in which the hollow knock of a single woodblock assumes significance. In her more customary position behind an array of percussion instruments, Lynn Vartan showed impeccable musicianship in her sublime reading of the delicate textures of this score, whose silences are often more demanding than the notes themselves.

William Dehning's choristers sang the wordless, meditative choral part with grace and admirably precise intonation--a true challenge when performing such consistently soft and sustained yet harmonically dense textures. On viola, Jonathan Moerschel was most impressive in the yearning melodic section, adorned with hushed pandiatonic choral clusters and pulsing vibraphone figurations, which serenely closes the piece. "Rothko Chapel" is a score that certainly deserves more performances, especially from musicians as excellent and committed as Crockett and his cohorts.

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