MUSIC REVIEW : Lynn Harrell Plays Variations on a Valedictory

Lynn Harrell has been a happy fixture on our musical horizon since his debut at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in 1974.

Although the cellist has indeed pursued a rewarding international career, Los Angeles has become his home. We have enjoyed the pleasure of his productive company not just as a virtuoso soloist but also as an esthetic conscience, a chamber-music specialist, an educator, and, haltingly, as a conductor.

Unlike many a glamorous and lazy colleague, he does not think history began with pretty Haydn and ended, at the latest, with dangerous Shostakovich. He has given any number of thorny modern challenges the benefit of his illuminating intellect, his discerning taste and his bravura technique, most notably at the deceptively whimsical Green Umbrella series sponsored by the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

The concert Monday night at the Japan America Theatre turned out to be an especially sentimental occasion. It was the last opening of the Umbrella for the season--a painfully curtailed season at that. More significant, perhaps, it was Harrell’s valedictory as a resident resource in matters of musical adventure.

In September he assumes the prestigious and demanding duties of principal at the British Royal Academy. It seems safe to fear that we will be seeing less of him.

London’s gain. Our loss.

His departing vehicle was a memorable one: the world premiere of a strikingly mellifluous set of Variations for cello and chamber ensemble by David Crumb.

Although the program biography kept the salient fact a family secret, the 30-year-old composer’s father happens to be another composer: the much-celebrated George Crumb. The son also rises.

Crumb fils has written a clever little essay that manages a graceful fusion of lush sonorities and faux -romantic harmonies within a taut, progressive structure. The basic tone is sweet, even when the inherent accents are not. The voice of the solo cello functions as part of an agitated ensemble, breaks loose in an effusive cadenza, and finally leads the way to an elegiac benediction.

The style may be daringly conservative. Nevertheless, its retrogression stops safely short of banality.

Harrell, a youthful 49, looked suitably impish in his Green Umbrella uniform: tuxedo embellished with the crimson tie (de rigueur) and matching crimson socks (now optional). More important, he played with the intense concentration, bel-canto suavity, restrained flamboyance and savoir-faire that are his interpretive hallmarks.

Leading a crisply attentive group of Philharmonic musicians, Oliver Knussen provided the sympathetic collaboration--don’t call it accompaniment--that one would expect from another composer. He also contributed two of his own pieces to the agenda: the engagingly scrambled, slightly sprightly, ultimately somber “Ophelia Dances,” Book I (1975), and the oddly inhibited, would-be pictorial “Songs Without Voices” (1992) in their Coast premiere.

Shulamit Ran, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1991, was represented with two of her relatively minor efforts: the spicy if rather academic “Mirage” of 1990 (another Coast premiere), and the showy if rather simplistic “For an Actor: Monologue for Clarinet,” written in 1978.

The linear convolutions of the former were dominated by the haunting amplified sound of Anne Diener Giles’ alto flute. The abstractions of the latter were performed with much gusto if not-so-much theatricality by Lorin Levee.

Knussen closed the program with the formidable Piece No. 1 for small orchestra by that rugged all-American iconoclast, outcast and exile, Conlon Nancarrow. Created in 1943 but not performed until 1982, it compresses an hour’s worth of serious ideas into seven minutes of innocent-sounding funk.

A fascinating finale.