Music: Moderns at Work

• Share

New music is enjoying a booming season. Audiences have a chance to shop among dozens of new works, many by well-known U.S. composers, some by composers seldom before in the public eye or ear. Some of the successes and more ambitious failures:

¶ A 45-minute operatic treatment of Honoré de Balzac's spine-tingler La Grande Bretêche, with music by California-born Stanley Hollingsworth, 32, pupil and protégé of Gian Carlo Menotti. Commissioned by the NBC Opera Company, Bretêche closely follows the Balzac tale—a bedroom farce given the Grand Guignol treatment— about a wife who hastily conceals her lover in a closet, swears to her husband there is no one there, and then stands by in helpless horror as the husband has the closet bricked up. While much of the original's strength derived from the calm, understated manner in which Balzac unfolded it, the operatic version staggers forward in a spasmodic series of contrived musical climaxes held together by a score that is pleasant, tuneful but inherently undramatic.

¶ A 20-minute symphonic poem by Chicago-born Pulitzer Prizewinning Composer Ernst Bacon, 58, with narration based on Paul Horgan's Pulitzer Prizewinning book Great River: The Rio Grande. Commissioned two years ago by the Dallas Symphony and performed under Walter Hendl, Rio Grande proved to be a collection of twelve thematic snippets—A River Created, Desert and Canyon: Texas-Mexico. Soldiers by Firelight—celebrating the river's history and lurid scenery. Composer Bacon's music, liberally scored for piano, vibraphone and harp, illuminates the text and is occasionally brilliantly evocative, e.g., in the tiny, clear sounds of the orchestra accompanying the words "The evening star hung like a drop of water in the sky" following an Indian rain dance. In other sections the music is fragmented by the necessities of text and sounds merely like a bland movie sound track.

¶ Symphony No. 1, by Philadelphia-born Pianist Leo Smit, 36, performed by the Boston Symphony under Charles Munch. The work, which was four years in the writing, is solidly constructed and pricked by a series of adroit, Stravinsky-like dislocations of rhythm. The strings are almost continually and often trickily active —so much so that they tend to drown out the detail of other instruments and blur the musical ideas.

¶ Jekyll and Hyde Variations, by Morton Gould, premiered by the New York Philharmonic. The piece, consisting of a theme and 13 variations, wittily—if obviously—evokes the opposing moods of the Stevenson story with calm, melodic passages alternating with turbulent climaxes. In an epilogue of glib, quiet harmonies, Gould mirrors the release through death of Stevenson's tortured hero.

¶ An 18-minute, four-part symphonic jazz suite by veteran Jazzman Lionel Hampton, 41, entitled King David and premiered under Dimitri Mitropoulos in Manhattan's Town Hall. Inspired and flavored by Hampton's recent tours of Israel ("I visited King David's tomb, and a chant just came to me"), the music tells in a plaintive harp opening of the Old Testament tribulations of the Jews, "blows down the Wailing Wall" in a mighty, jumping blast of brass, moves through a lively vibraphone dance to a deafening, full-orchestra crescendo of triumph.