Series Launches With ‘Exploding Piano’

LA JOLLA —  A promise of fireworks hung in the air Monday night when Noise at the Library--the contemporary music series at the Athenaeum--began its third season with Kathleen Supove’s program of local and world premieres, entitled “The Exploding Piano.”

The New York-based pianist fulfilled expectations, particularly through the unveiling of Chinary Ung’s “Seven Mirrors.” Long in coming--seven years after pianists Supove, Gloria Cheng-Cochran, Stephen Drury and Charles Wells commissioned it through a Meet the Composer program--the work divides into seven distinct but thematically linked movements. Ung, Cambodian-born and now a professor at UC San Diego, mixes interpretations of familiar, even hackneyed, Western gestures with Eastern flavors for engaging effect.

Heavy tremolos begin and end the work, resurfacing in its third movement, “Roar, Lion of the Heart,” as innocent bleating against posturing chords in the bass. A “ta-da”-type rhythm becomes motivic source material. Dialogue between contrasting ideas--especially at the center point of the piece, “ . . . Laughter Passes Over the Earth”--adds dimension and gentle humor.

These Western techniques mingle with Asian atmospheres, especially in “Dotted Path,” with its circular, repeating motifs, and in the Impressionistic harmonies of “ . . . Space Between the Fish and the Moon.”

Despite Supove’s lucid championship, not everything on the roster created a level of interest commensurate with its technical demands. Piotr Grella-Mozejko’s program notes, in which he describes his Sonata No. 1, “Horyzont zapomnienia” (The Horizon of Forgetfulness), as “constant arguing, discussing with myself the possibilities of musical matter and the limitations of human physicality,” were more interesting than his bombastic fracas.

The least pyrotechnic pieces gave some of the most affecting results. Eve Beglarian’s “Landscaping for Privacy” offered fun and provocation: The composer recited a poem by Linda Norton, Supove took on most of the bubbly, hypnotic part originally written for PC88, while a tape supplied the rest. “The New Dancetudes,” by Randall Woolf, delivered touching, whimsical nods to Baroque dance forms, and selections from David Lang’s “Eight Memory Pieces” explored limited materials in bittersweet memorial to friends who have died.