Some Old Friends, Fresh Voices Under the Green Umbrella

Monday night at Zipper Hall--an acoustically inviting first-time locale for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella series--there was ample room for old friends and fresh voices from the new music repertory.

The old friend was Lutoslawski, whose music has been haunting the Philharmonic’s programs this fall in an informal, free-floating festival. His String Quartet has been played many times in L.A.--and violinists Camille Avellano and Elizabeth Baker, violist Meredith Snow and cellist Daniel Rothmuller were thoroughly attuned to the piece’s gruff humor, aggression and subtleties.

New to this series, though, was Lutoslawski’s fascinating “Subito”(1992), a souvenir of his lyrical final period that sounds like a spinoff from the concurrent Symphony No. 4. Philharmonic new music advisor Steven Stucky speculated that “Subito” was a sketch for the violin concerto that Lutoslawski was writing just before his death, and he’s probably right; the ravishingly melodic, skittering solo line cries out for an orchestra. Despite a somewhat coarse tone, violinist Bing Wang made a passionate case for it, backed by pianist Gloria Cheng.

Earlier, Cheng and Vicki Ray offered a duo-piano tour-de-force called “A Complete Wealth of Time” by Edmund J. Campion. This piece is full of good ideas that are cascaded and elaborated in a stream of rolling arpeggios and catchy, shifting rhythms. One is reminded of John Adams in the harmonies and the way Campion’s rhetoric unfolds, yet he has an attractive eclectic voice all his own.

Amid alluring sonorities and jazz-rhythm echoes, Dutilleux’s “Les Citations” didn’t hang together, despite the efforts of harpsichordist Cheng, oboist Carolyn Hove, percussionist John Magnussen and bassist Christopher Hanulik. Much the same problem plagued Ramon Lazkano’s “Bihurketak,” as administered by Wang, Ray and cellist Gloria Lum. For a model of how to organize diverse ideas, well, how about Lutoslawski’s String Quartet?