With a brassy blast onstage and an ethereal sigh from violas as if from another planet, the Monday Evening Concerts proclaimed their return in full force at Zipper Hall last week. Last year’s concerts had been a tentative set of “what if?” programs under guest curators, designed to see whether this basic and essential venture in musical exploration could survive the shock of being rudely cut loose by its grossly misguided LACMA management. Now we know; last week’s was one of the great programs in Monday Evening Concerts annals: important music wisely chosen by a management firmly in place, performed by a nicely selected ensemble mix of local and international players. Of the three remaining programs in this season’s docket — the next on January 7 — the same may be said.
This one began with music by Romania’s Horatiu Radulescu, played by the Alsatian violist Vincent Royer, who in two extended works — one in partnership with our own Kazi Pitelka — took his instrument into mysterious, spectral realms while crowning those almost-silent areas with dark-toned, near-brutal melodic patches. “Spectral” is, in fact, the current term for this intensely inward music; it has many practitioners, including the late Gérard Grisey, whose works the Philharmonic has played. In his view of musical sound as a spiritual substance, Radulescu can also be seen as something of a disciple of the late Karlheinz Stockhausen — who died last week — although the task of cataloging the vastness of that German visionary’s influence on his several contemporary generations is likely to occupy decades.
So, of course, does the music of Igor Stravinsky, whose In Memoriam Dylan Thomas provided a brief oasis of almost-tonality. The Monday Evenings gave the work its premiere in 1954; I produced its radio premiere, simultaneously, at Berkeley’s KPFA. (Funny: There hasn’t been a day since, when I can’t hear old Edgar Jones singing on demand its five-note theme, yet I think of it as a melodically austere piece.)
Then came the music of Iannis Xenakis, another Romanian: first, the breathtaking solo percussion piece Rebonds, played by the astonishing Steven Schick; then Eonta, “chamber music” (it says here) for piano and five brass instruments. Two trumpets and three trombones have at the piano for some 20 exhilarating minutes. They play into the strings, aim their instruments upward to reverberate, against the ceiling and against the back wall, out into the crowd; they generally misbehave. The pianist — the phenomenal Eric Huebner, fearless, red-haired local-boy-making-good in the realms of new music — enters the fray with something like 20 fingers at the ready. The piece is an explosion of pure, nonstop energy. Xenakis wrote it for the Japanese virtuoso Yuji Takahashi. His sister Aki has also taken it over. That’s okay; there are notes enough for two.