MUSIC REVIEWS : INSTITUTE ENSEMBLES AT ROYCE HALL

Exposure to the broadest range of repertory is an ideal to which every musical training organization subscribes. However, in the day-to-day running of an educational facility--especially one that convenes for only a few weeks every summer--that exposure demands planning, cunning and astuteness.

Those qualities seem to exist at the management level of the 1987 Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute. For proof, one need only have attended the latest Institute Orchestra concert Sunday night at UCLA’s Royce Hall. Works by Mel Powell, Morton Subotnick, John Adams, Victor Herbert and Nicolas Slonimsky comprised the program; five conductors took the podium and the total experience gave pleasure.

Pleasure-giving is the main business of Herbert’s 102-year old Cello Concerto No. 1, a tuneful and crafty, unspoiled remnant of late Romanticism. It was written in Stuttgart, where the young Irish composer completed his education and began his career--as a solo and orchestral cellist--long before his American successes as conductor and composer of operettas.

As he had done for Herbert’s Second Concerto, in Hollywood Bowl five years ago, Lynn Harrell was the protagonist and leading advocate of this neglected and irresistible opus. He provided songfulness, effortless virtuoso flights and a sense of purpose to the still-fresh work, but he did not do so alone; throughout, conductor David Alan Miller and the Institute Orchestra provided an alert, glowing and solid background.

Leading up to this plateau, Powell’s recent “Modules,” Subotnick’s “After the Butterfly” (1979) and Adams’ “The Chairman Dances” (1985) held the interest through eventfulness, sound-color and dramatic moment. “Modules” is an intermezzo, for 16 players, of disjunct happenings held together through 12 minutes by tightness of thought and economy of statement. “After the Butterfly,” for ensemble forces, including “ghost” electronics, totaling 11 participants, remains as cogent and engrossing an ascent into--then descent from-- musical climax as it seemed at its premiere on Monday Evening Concerts, eight years ago.

Adams’ “foxtrot for orchestra,” an excerpt from his opera “Nixon in China,” still awaiting its premiere performances this fall, has already had much currency; that currency may increase to the point at which “The Chairman Dances” is as familiar as Ravel’s “Bolero”--and for the same reasons of accessibility and hypnotic effect.

Peter Ioannou conducted the Powell work, Clyde Mitchell the Subotnick, Peter Rubardt the Adams. At the end of the evening, Institute co-director Lukas Foss revived Slonimsky’s “My Toy Balloon,” complete with the release, during the finale, of multicolored balloons from the ceiling.