Ben Weber Rapsodie Concertante for Viola & Small Orchestra Part Two

Ben Weber, born in 1916 in St. Louis, was largely self-taught as a composer. He was one of the first Americans to embrace the 12-tone techniques of Schoenberg, starting in 1938. After moving to New York in 1945, he maintained a strikingly diverse circle of friends, Milton Babbitt, John Cage, Leonard Bernstein and the poet Frank O'Hara among them. A voluble, roly-poly man talker, and excellent cook, Weber became more reclusive as he got older. He died alone at 63.

Weber's personality is reflected in his music, by turns witty and melancholic, rigorous and free-wheeling. Two works for cello and piano, played compellingly by the cellist Joel Krosnick and the pianist Gilbert Kalish, are typical. Five Pieces for cello and piano (1941) was inspired by Webern's radically concise 12-tone works. But Weber could not stifle his bent for expansive lyricism and bold gestures. In Three Capriccios for cello and piano (1977), one gets the sense that his adaptation of the 12-tone technique was his way of ensuring that his music would keep its cutting edge and not slip into Romanticism. There is a rather Brahmsian spirit trying to emerge here. In the ''Concert Aria After Solomon,'' performed by the soprano Lauren Skuce with an ensemble including members of the New York Woodwind Quintet, Weber gave free rein to his rhapsodic side, with engaging results.

This event was conceived by the composer Roger Trefousse, whose idea it was to invite five of Weber's composer-colleagues to compose tributes using, if they chose to, the same instruments that Weber did in his self-effacing Prelude and Nocturne: flute (Tara Helen O'Connor), cello (Dorothy Lawson) and celesta (Margaret Kampmeier). Mr. Trefousse's contribution was a colorful ''Fantasia on the Name of Ben Weber.''

The best of these tributes were equally self-effacing. Mr. Babbitt's ''Composition for One Instrument and Ben'' is a sparkling piece of about one minute for solo piano (played by Michael Barrett). Ned Rorem's ''For Ben,'' a wistfully lyrical solo piano work that Mr. Rorem performed, is spiked with pungent harmony that captured Weber's nature. Lou Harrison, who could not attend, offered a spunky piece for flute, cello and celesta alive with pulsating ethno-music rhythms.

[This channel yikes features pieces by other early American adopters of twelve-tone technique, including Wallingford Riegger and Adolph Weiss, both of whom wrote dodecaphonic pieces in the 1920s.)

The soloist in this performance of Webers Rapsodie Concertante for Viola & Small Orchestra, Op. 47, is Walter Trampler.

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