Sounding a Joyous Jubilee

By Michael Walsh

What was it like to be in Vienna during the heyday of Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert? Music lovers today can only wonder enviously, but within a single week recently Americans had the extraordinary opportunity to discover new works by three of their country's leading masters. In New York City with the Israel Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, 68, unveiled his high-spirited Jubilee Games. In Miami, Elliott Carter, 77, heard the Composers Quartet chart his latest passage through twelve-tone thickets in his String Quartet No. 4. And in Philadelphia, there was the premiere of Queenie Pie, a little-known "street opera" by Duke Ellington. Rarely has the breadth, diversity and achievement of American composers been in such abundant evidence during so short a period of time.

Jubilee Games was written for the 50th anniversary of the Israel Philharmonic (the orchestra predates the founding of its country). A two- movement piece, it is a kind of numerological Hebraic rhapsody. In the first movement, "Free-Style Events," the orchestral players improvise lustily on a seven-note scale while shouting out seven times sheva, the Hebrew word for the mystical number seven, then proclaiming "Hamishim!," which means 50. Brass instruments evoke the blowing of the shofar, the ram's horn used in sacred services; strings scuttle along skittishly; even a synthesizer chimes in.

The second movement, "Diaspora Dances," is more conventional but no less eclectic. Letters of the Hebrew alphabet are given numerical values, which serve as the music's metrical underpinning. The exotic sounds of ancient Palestine mingle with the plaintive songs of the shtetl and the joyous urgency of jazz, encompassing in quick sketches Jewish music through the ages. Only Bernstein would try something like this, and only he could get away with it. Emotionally undisciplined, Jubilee Games is no masterpiece, but it is fresh and powerful, and one of Bernstein's most honest pieces in years.

Honesty is a trait that has long marked Carter's music. So have obscurity, density and a resolute unwillingness to compromise. As one of the leading (and one of the last) exponents of academic serialism, a postwar compositional style marked by rigid mathematical organization of pitch and rhythm, Carter tends to be honored more in words than with performances. But his String Quartet No. 2 and No. 3 won Pulitzer Prizes in 1960 and 1973, and a hard core of enthusiasts rapturously greets each new work. The Second Quartet treated each instrument as an individual; the Third paired them. In the Fourth Quartet, Carter finally has reunited two violins, viola and cello. In four movements that flow together seamlessly, the piece bristles with ferocious rhythmic difficulty: a five-note figure in the viola may be pitted against a nine-note phrase in the second violin. It takes nimble fingers to play this music and nimbler ears to follow it.

At first glance Queenie Pie hardly seems the stuff from which either operas or hit musicals are made. In storied Harlem, an annual beauty contest for hairdressers is under way, and the proud, haughty Queenie Pie (Teresa Burrell) is on the verge of her 13th consecutive title. Unexpectedly, she is challenged by an upstart from New Orleans, the leggy Cafe Olay (Patty Holley), and is forced to examine her arid life. There is an extended dream sequence on a mythic island, during which Queenie Pie discovers where her heart really lies. At the end, victorious, she magnanimously gives up her crown to go off with Lil Daddy (Larry Marshall), who has been in love with her for years.

Originally envisioned as a work for television, Queenie Pie was left incomplete at Ellington's death in 1974. In putting it on the stage, the American Music Theater Festival had to play Rimsky-Korsakov to Ellington's Mussorgsky. Ellington's original libretto was recast by George C. Wolfe, the tunes were fitted with new words by George David Weiss, and the score was reworked by Conductor (and sometime Ellington collaborator) Maurice Peress under the supervision of the composer's son Mercer. The trick was to minimize the book's implausibilities while making the most of the score's seductive melodies.

For all the cooks, however, the broth is delicious. From the opening, on- your-toes Harlem Scat, through the kick-up-your-heels flapper dance of The Hairdo Hop, past the wild jungle dance of Stix, round the sultry, smoky bend of A Blues for Two Women and back home to Harlem for the finale, Queenie Pie is unmistakably the work of the grand Duke. In the pit, the Duke Ellington Orchestra steps through the score's uptown opulence with high style, trumpets growling and keyboards swinging, while onstage, members of Director-Choreograp her Garth Fagan's Bucket Dance Theater juke and okeydoke their way through kinetic, hyperactive routines.

However romanticized its view of a Harlem that never quite existed, Queenie Pie rings with authority. There are perhaps unconscious echoes of Porgy and Bess in characters and settings; almost the whole second act takes place on a kind of Kittiwah Island. But instead of Gershwin's "lampblack Negroisms," as Ellington aptly called them, Queenie Pie has the authentic sass and soul of black America. This is what really happened to Bess after she left Catfish Row. Following its three-week run in Philadelphia, Queenie Pie moves to Washington's Kennedy Center for a month. After that, there ought to be a boat that is leaving for New York City. Are you listening, Broadway?