Composer Steven Stucky, dead at 66, guided new music at both the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics.

By Richard S. Ginell

LOS ANGELES – Mortality has taken a terrible toll this winter among pop and rock performers from, and just before, the boomer generation – David Bowie, Maurice White, Glenn Frey, Paul Kantner, Dan Hicks, etc. – and the year has barely begun. Now, the classical world has lost someone of that generation suddenly and prematurely. The Pulitzer-Prize-winning composer Steven Stucky, only 66, died of brain cancer on Valentine’s Day – and perhaps no region aside from his hometown of Ithaca, N.Y., has felt the blow as intimately as Southern California.

Stucky was also a teacher, lecturer, and author. He mattered to us because he was associated with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for a longer period of time than any of the orchestra’s music directors – and longer than any composer for any American orchestra, unless you count Duke Ellington’s 50 uninterrupted years leading his band!

Stucky was also a teacher, orchestra consultant, lecturer and author.

Stucky became the orchestra’s composer-in-residence under André Previn in 1988, succeeding John Harbison, and then, when that position expired, staying on as the consulting composer for new music all through the Esa-Pekka Salonen years. When Salonen, a colleague and close pal, left in 2009, so did Stucky, having overseen the Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella new music series through his moves over the years from the Japan America Theatre in Little Tokyo to the Colburn School’s Zipper Concert Hall, and finally, the future-world interior of Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Throughout his long tenure under the Green Umbrella, Stucky would usually deliver the pre-concert lectures, brandishing his intelligence, knowledge of the inside-baseball of composition, and sardonic wit in a way that banded listeners together in a not-so-secret society. He also conducted interviews with many visiting and resident composers and performers, sporting a determined poker face as he probed his subjects, never overmatched. Though most of us never visited Cornell University, where he taught, we were in effect Stucky’s students for 21 years, much longer than any undergrad would have been.

Eventually he would perform the same service for the New York Philharmonic’s Hear & Now concerts. I don’t know how many of Stucky’s pre-concert talks were preserved, but if you have Apple Music or iTunes, you can hear a five-minute sample of what Stucky’s talks were like at the tail end of Gustavo Dudamel’s DG Concerts performance of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (sorry, it’s online only).

Stucky won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005.

Being on the inside of the Philharmonic’s new music establishment – he once half-joked that he and Salonen used to be youngsters who now “have their hands on the levers of power” – Stucky was able to play a big part in the programming of the Green Umbrella concerts. He must have taken particular pride in the semi-regular residencies of his idol Witold Lutosławski, of whom Stucky wrote a benchmark study, Lutosławski and His Music, in 1981. (He was once heard to proclaim Lutosławski as “our Beethoven.”)

We would hear Stucky’s music frequently, too, although he wasn’t as relentless a self-promoter as he could have been in his position. Like Salonen, Stucky’s years in Los Angeles changed him as a composer as well. He had access to an excellent symphony orchestra that he could write for, and his palette of colors grew. His Second Concerto for Orchestra (2003) – the piece that got the Pulitzer – was written for the Philharmonic, and deep into the Dudamel regime, Stucky’s Symphony, with its fantasy land of carefully controlled ad libitum effects heavily influenced by Lutosławski, received its world premiere from the Phil in 2012.

Stucky later began to take on historical events and issues that affected the boomers, such as the powerful dramatic cantata August 4, 1964 – a juxtaposition of the best of Lyndon Johnson (his commitment to civil rights) and the worst (the Gulf of Tonkin resolution) – and a choral piece Take Him, Earth that commemorated the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. “It made my work more realistic, less theoretical,” he once told the Los Angeles Times about his years here. “There’s a sense when escaping the academy is a liberation.”

But if there is one piece to which I would gravitate as a remembrance of Steve Stucky, it has to be The Classical Style, the uproarious one-act opera in which he supplied the music for Jeremy Denk’s gleefully funny libretto. [At right, fast-forward to 41:42.] Having retired from Cornell that year (2014) and perhaps feeling further liberated, Stucky went on a musicological spree, with one devilishly clever quote, parody, and burlesque after another of everybody’s music that he and Denk could think of.

Just before the premiere of The Classical Style at the Ojai Festival, Stucky quipped that he was “putting those decades of teaching sophomore theory” at Cornell to good use. Alas, it would be one of his last compositions. And so, like Verdi, who bid farewell to the stage with a smile (Falstaff), Stucky leaves us with the image of a teacher at play, sending up everything that he had learned and taught with a mischievous grin.

Richard S. Ginell writes regularly about music for the Los Angeles Times, and is also the Los Angeles correspondent for American Record Guide and the West Coast regional editor for Classical Voice North America.

The Australian Chamber Orchestra performed a water-laden work, ‘The Reef,’ at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

By Richard S. Ginell

LOS ANGELES – The last time the Australian Chamber Orchestra toured the United States — April 2015 — they brought Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s Water with them as part of an otherwise conventional program of Mozart and Haydn. Also, everyone except the cellos played the music on their feet, Baroque-style.

Daredevil Australian surfer Derek Hynd is featured in the film.

Yet when they turned up Feb. 16 at Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Aussies were seated and the stage was dark. There was water on their agenda again, all right, but now it came in the form of gigantic waves from a faraway ocean on a big screen. And the program was anything but conventional. Indeed, it was unlike anything I can recall even in a playground for new music and multi-media tricks like Disney Hall.

This was The Reef, a 101-minute fusion of live music from a bewilderingly wide variety of genres, and films from the deserts and coastlines of the remotest reaches of Northwestern Australia. It was a fortuitous confluence that this program landed in between installments of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s “City of Light” festival, for The Reef fit right in with the multi-media dominance of Disney Hall in the month of February.

If you’ve ever seen the granddaddy of all surf films, Bruce Brown’s riveting The Endless Summer from 1966 (celebrating its 50th anniversary, as can be seen on the website), you would recognize The Reef as a high-tech sequel, updating the genre with extreme close-up photography. The focus is on the daredevil Australian surfer Derek Hynd, who manages to ride some of the most spectacularly dangerous-looking waves on the planet on a surfboard without a fin (he received the rather unique credit in the program book as director of surfing).

We don’t spend much time in the outback, just enough for Hynd to drive across the continent from the east to the west. But just as Deborah O’Grady did in her Utah national parks video earlier this month, director Mick Sowry makes the usual point about man’s inhumanity to nature by showing a desert scene littered with rusting junk.

Aboriginal singer/guitarist Stephen Pigram performed.

To these and the ocean scenes, the Australian musicians played through a wildly shape-shifting program for which the term “eclectic” seems completely inadequate. It had everything except real surfing music — no Beach Boys or Ventures or any of that stuff.

Before the film started, artistic director and concertmaster Richard Tognetti announced that there would be a “Welcome to Country” prelude to immerse us in the landscape. We were promptly greeted by the strange, electronic-sounding honking of Shelton Murray’s didgeridoo, accompanied by fizzing Stravinsky-like strings in Iain Grandage’s and Mark Atkins’s Immutable. Then the Aboriginal singer-guitarist Stephen Pigram, a native of the far northwest, sang some very pleasing pop-folk-like songs in a reedy, nasal voice with lovely, suave string backing. It sounded very close to 1970s-vintage Gordon Lightfoot — and that’s a compliment.

The film got underway to some competently done, mood-setting scoring written by Tognetti himself, and his cues would serve as links among a succession of many short pieces in a circus of styles. The glass harmonicas in George Crumb’s “God-music” from Black Angels soon gave way to bustling Rameau from Les Boréades and then back to Crumb for the scratchy fiddling of “Night of the Electric Insects” (also from Black Angels). The delicious melding of microtones and standard tuning in Ligeti’s Ramifications accompanied the scene of the desert junkyard, and a J.S. Bach fugue arranged by Tognetti served as delicate ballet music for a surfer flying through the mist.

But after the minimalist agitations of Wojciech Kilar’s Orawa rose to a peak, we were met by a high-decibel blast of metal-munching grunge rock, Alice in Chains’ “Them Bones,” with Satu Vänskä – the ACO’s principal violinist – morphing convincingly into a rock singer in tandem with Tasmanian singer-songwriter Craig Johnston.  As suddenly as the blast appeared, it was gone, replaced by the almost comically sweet strains of Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise”! Both were accompanying essentially the same thing, some of the wildest waves of all, yet the strange juxtaposition began to make some sense — heavy-metal for the violence of the water, Rachmaninoff for the serenity of the brave surfers riding it.

Australian Chamber Orchestra artistic director Richard Tognetti.

With the brutal Allegro molto from Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony, Op. 110a in Rudolf Barshai’s transcription – brilliantly and vehemently played by the ACO strings — the emphasis on aqua-violence returned. Then Tognetti showed off some of his range as a composer, moving from moody electronic underscoring to cavernous arena rock to a haunted pop ballad for voice (the versatile Vänskä again), strings, and mallets.

Finally, Beethoven had the last word as Sowry pointed his camera at the galaxies. It was the celestial Cavatina from the String Quartet, Op. 130, which just happens to be the piece that was included on the recording of Earth’s sounds taken along by Voyager on its journey through the solar system. It was soulfully played, at first by a quartet of first-desk players who were eventually joined by the rest of the strings.

All of this gave some listeners stylistic whiplash — there were a few walkouts during the Ligeti — and I’m not sure whether it was meant to cohere. A generous spirit could say that this program was an expansion of Mahler’s remark to Sibelius that a symphony should be like the world and embrace everything, which this certainly tried to do. But overall, the whole show was a lot of unpredictable, off-beat fun, a tour-de-force for a skilled ensemble unrepentant in its obliteration of boundaries, and also a lingering look at some seldom-visited seascapes and landscapes.

From here, the ACO took The Reef on a very short U.S. tour — to New York’s Kaufman Concert Hall Feb. 18 and Richmond’s Camp Concert Hall at the University of Virginia Feb. 20 before heading back to Australia.

Richard S. Ginell writes regularly about music for the Los Angeles Times, and is also the Los Angeles correspondent for American Record Guide and the West Coast regional editor for Classical Voice North America.