Something akin to a revelation blew through The Granada Theatre last Sunday. The mighty Los Angeles Philharmonic was making a routine stop in town, hosted by Community Arts Music Association (CAMA), in their 105th year of doing so, and with 300 local concerts under the twin organizational belt. But what distinguished this appearance was the presence of two exciting world premieres — Ellen Reid’s West Coast Sky Eternal and Gabriella Smith’s Lost Coast: Concerto for Cello and Orchestra.
Both are adventurous works challenging the status quo and conservative ears.
Encountering new L.A. Phil–commissioned orchestral works is nothing new for this game and crackerjack orchestra on its home turf, but to hear these sonic adventures in Santa Barbara — where edgy contemporary music is seldom heard — felt somewhat disorienting and, given the bold character of the music, utterly thrilling. Caveat: That is thrilling if you like that sort of thing (present company included). A strong convention-minded portion of the audience apparently did not like that sort of thing, and patiently waited for Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, post-intermission.
Not at all surprisingly, maestro Gustavo Dudamel — nabbed to move east to the New York philharmonic in two years — led the orchestra to an immaculate Beethoven-ian landscape to close the concert, and CAMA season.
But the big news and culturally life-affirming matter arrived in the first half. As a matter of instructive comparison, both young composers (and yes, they are both women, for a change) roughly align themselves with fresh ideas concerning the centuries-old business of orchestral writing. Both savor the notion of celebrating the flexible sonic mass of a large orchestra, used in duly massive and painterly ways, versus the traditional tactic of dividing up sections and creating contrapuntal moving parts within the ensemble. Allusions to the environment, and concern over its fragile state, is another common influence.
Even so, their processes and results veer in different directions. A sense of shifting clouds, in all their structural ambiguity, hovers over Reid’s West Coast Sky Eternal, with its mutating, swarming orchestral chords and sensuous sonorities. Melodic fragments emerge and recede from the sound clouds, sometimes swerving into optimistic modal echoes of Aaron Copland and early John Adams, and with the chatter/clatter of pizzicato and gently closing with a whispering aerial sustained chord.
Smith, who was one of the standout young composers showcased in the 2021 Ojai Music Festival (with Adams as music director), has expanded on her chamber piece Lost Coast. Her brand-new orchestral incarnation — also featuring cellist Gabriel Cabezas, as on the record — is strongly related to the original, but is also a renewed, epic and viscerally powerful entity unto itself.
In effect, she has widened the musical canvas and taken on the challenge of seizing the expressive potential of a large orchestra as instrumental force of reckoning and subtle powers. She revels in the loamy surge of low strings, with cello soloist Cabezas as protagonist/ringleader of the pack. She also celebrates massed orchestral sonics — sometimes reminiscent of such early Adams pieces as Harmonielehre — and keenly plays up the contrasts of chaos and resolution, dissonant sound heaps and beams of consonant light. Suddenly, the piece falls into an actual three-fourths rhythm — an actual “groove” — with strummed violins and violas, before descending into organized disarray, with Dudamel guiding the orchestral abstraction with numbered behavioral cues rather than tempo or dynamic gestures.
In Lost Coast, things go mad, yes, but are ever easing into degrees of composure. Fittingly, the piece literally ends with a fuzzy section abruptly tightening into a crisp and sharply focused closing chord. We feel as if we’ve taken a journey both arduous and transforming, in keeping with Smith’s original inspiration for the piece — reflections on an epic backpacking trip in Northern California.
In all, this was a concert of new orchestral vistas, laid out by brave composers untethered from tradition and bringing their own “what if” creative toolkits to the task.