Composers

But though the concerto's U.S. premiere Friday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall by percussionist Martin Grubinger and guest conductor Christoph Eschenbach was but a deuxième, the L.A. Phil's very first notes of 2013 were still fresh and wondrous... Tan's orchestral writing is color drenched. One minute, we could be reminded that he's an avant-gardist communing with sound as sound (he recently conducted a concert in China where he introduced new pieces meant to be in dialogue with John Cage). The next minute, he can be a happy Hollywood composer blockbuster-bound (he won an Oscar for his "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" score). ...In some of Tan's recent orchestral music, he takes a simple melodic motive and doesn't let go of it, drumming it in, so to speak, in every which way and with every kind of instrumental combination imaginable. That describes the final cadenza. But what might have been a cheap trick turned into such an exuberantly elaborate one that I fell for it, and so did the rest of the audience, if the huge applause was anything to go by.