MUSIC REVIEWS : California EAR Unit Delivers Unusual Concert

Never an ensemble to take its fringe status for granted, the California EAR Unit made a fittingly stage-setting entrance at its Monday Evening Concert at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Deadpanning, the musicians took the stage in handcuffs, to present the Los Angeles premiere of Amnon Wolman’s “No U Turn,” coaxing layers of rhythm and texture from these implements of limited mobility.

Here lies a graphic illustration of the notion that an aesthetic stance can be forged through limitations. And so it went throughout the evening, as the EAR Unit veered every which way but toward chamber music tradition.

Frederic Rzewski’s intriguing “Crusoe,” also a local premiere, made extra-instrumental demands within its mannered framework of 65 movements, each roughly 15 seconds long. In addition to miniatures scored for traditional instruments, the piece involves sundry modes of vocalizing and such sound-producing means as breaking tree branches. Rzewski’s grimmer reflections on the existential metaphor of Crusoe’s tale are neatly offset by an undercurrent of irony and a hyper-episodic structural scheme.

Closing the concert, MesoAmerican music expert Martin Espino’s “The Dream of Aztlan” required the group to muster its valiant best on a palette of pre-Columbian percussion and wind instruments. Espino’s opus provided a refreshing cultural shift away from diversion from standard concert fare, but its folkloric earnestness seemed at odds with the rest of the program.

The sum effect was an evening that was offbeat, and off the beaten path, by Western concert standards. Perhaps a bit too far off: These fine musicians had little chance to work out on the tools of their trade. Even Tristan Murail’s brusquely coloristic tone poem, “Treize Couleurs du Soleil Couchant,” had the players weaving slowly in and out of timbral and harmonic focus.