The lights never turned off in Royce Hall Saturday night. The
audience waited for it, but the music played on anyway.
The Los Angeles Philharmonic played in bright lights with
equally shiny pieces. The first, “Hallelujah Junction,”
was a 1998 John Adams piece that harkened back to older days of
minimalism. Two pianos played interlocking harmonic and rhythmic
patterns that expanded into a kind of musical stew similar to that
in Terry Riley’s “In C.”
“Hallelujah Junction” is not a meditation on faith,
but rather the music inspired by a real Hallelujah Junction, a
truck stop on the Nevada-California border. The harmonies ventured
occasionally into jazz and sometimes the rhythm rocked hard. The
piece was a beautiful exercise in texture, but lacked the
philosophical musings of Steve Reich’s music.
The second piece, “Voices,” was the flashiest piece
of the night. Adams introduced the composer Derek Bermel as his
protege and conducted his piece. If Adams’ piece lacked
philosophy, then Bermel’s was an affront to philosophy.
Bermel doesn’t build a climax, he throws it in your face.
His clarinet solos don’t fight with the orchestra, but
interrupt it. He doesn’t write bad music in the name of
academic complexity. He does, however, play his own solos with a
comic deadpan.
“Voices” began with an homage to Carl
Stalling’s cartoon music. You could hear the coyote sneaking
up on the roadrunner only to fall down a cliff. You could see
stealthy tip-toeing that gets exposed and the subsequent shame of
being caught. Later the music ventured into Celtic fiddle music, a
snake-charming parody and a raucous rock sound complete with
backbeats and funky bass guitar. In the words of one elderly woman
overheard during intermission, “Wasn’t that
different?”
Indeed, the mess of pop culture references was a low-calorie
meal, making “Voices” enjoyable and fun, providing
comic relief for the classical music lover.
Under maestro Esa-Pekka Salonen, the final piece, “Naive
and Sentimental Music,” was the best of the night. If the
previous two pieces lacked weight, “Naive” packed a
heavy punch. Adams is a master of using the orchestra and he
demonstrated this with a three-movement piece that takes its time
waxing and waning like a vast ocean building up to a grand tidal
wave.
While the previous two pieces seemed to have a self-conscious
importance, “Naive” was the expression of the
unconscious, of where we dreamed the music could expand to, but
never imagined it could actually get.
Adams made it happen with Salonen (to whom “Naive”
is dedicated), who was dancing around his podium like a madman,
enjoying the changing rhythms and brass entrances. His muscle power
carried the piece and when he dropped his arms and stood still like
a mummy, the orchestra stopped as if he had dropped it.
The shining display only required a final element, stars.
Fulfilling that was Geoffrey Rush, who sat in the third row center.
But there were no fans around him. The truth was Salonen and Adams,
both who did post-concert signings, were the real stars of the
night, as they well deserved to be.