MUSIC REVIEWS : A Brilliantly Played, But Dully Discussed ‘Innovator’

Ferociously concentrated technique is always welcome in recital, but it becomes positively revelatory when intelligently applied to an adventuresome agenda, such as Alan Feinberg’s program, “The American Innovator.”

Latest of the Monday Evening Concerts at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “The American Innovator” links a diverse collection of music into a substantial and often thrilling exploration.

The pianist, alas, did not allow the music to speak completely for itself. Instead of articulating unified ideas, Feinberg’s rambling, unstudied spoken introductions suggested that his clever program was just a serendipitous kludge.

He communicated much more clearly in music than in words, however, and the willing ear could make connections that are admittedly hard to put into speech.

Much of the evening, Feinberg operated at a level of hammering intensity. That was overt in works such as Charles Ives’ pounding, parodistic Study No. 20, Ruth Crawford Seeger’s insistent “Etude in Mixed Accents” and Leo Ornstein’s virtuosic “A la Chinoise,” all delivered with maximum clarity and kinetic momentum.

Charles Wuorinen took the motor energy of those pieces and drove typically knotty textures and structures relentlessly in his Sonata No. 3. As exhausting to hear as it must be to play, this big sonata seemed perpetually apoplectic, its loud, fast mania broken only by ghostly dance intimations at the beginning of the middle movement.

The timbral requirements of Henry Cowell’s “Aeolian Harp,” with its efforts to turn the piano into a giant zither, and John Cage’s “Bacchanale” for prepared piano, forced some relief into an evening where even Thelonious Monk’s “Ruby, My Dear” could sound cold and hectoring.

But if you began to suspect Feinberg never met a note he didn’t like loud and steely, there was a rapt, feathery account of John Adams’ “China Gates,” alive with fluttering color, to refute the notion.

Feinberg also included the unsettling humors of Charles Dodge’s “Any Resemblance is Purely Coincidental”--titled on this program “Any Resemblance to is Accidental”--a mix of technological caricature and post-Romantic poignancy. Dodge puts a recording of Caruso singing “Vesti la giubba” through electronically processed paces, accompanied with rhetorical wit by the live pianist.

Feinberg returns to the Museum Dec. 7 with another installment of his “Discover America” series.