At this week’s concerts, the National Symphony Orchestra premiered the new harp concerto that it commissioned from Mark Adamo. Adamo dedicated Four Angels to conductor Leonard Slatkin, who helped make the commission happen, and the NSO’s principal harpist, Dotian Levalier, for whom the solo part was created. On Friday night at the Kennedy Center, Slatkin led the NSO through a sensitive reading of this rather traditional but hauntingly lovely score. The first movement is named for Metatron, in the Kabbalah the name of the angel closest to the throne of God. Dressed in a lemon chiffon gown, Levalier strummed her way through the rather conventional harp part, accompanied by tinkly, chromatic percussion and eye-bulging slides in the brass.

The second movement is a scherzo called Sraosha, after the angel of divine intuition in the Zoroastrian tradition. Adamo evokes the Persian background with an extravagant battery of unusual percussion (bell tree, Chinese Opera gongs and other gongs, crotales, temple blocks, vibraslap, and so on). Some modern composers tend to use percussion as a coloristic crutch. In this case, percussive string attacks and buzzing harp sounds created by chromatic pedal crashes round out the exotic texture.

Adamo dedicated the third movement, Regina Coeli (not an angel at all, but the Mother of God, Queen of Angels), to his mother. It is a gentle aria for luscious Hollywood strings, with the percussion banished from the gentle atmosphere, ending on a thick A-flat major chord. A melody of fourths and fifths, which appears regally in the first movement and enigmatically in the scherzo, is smoothed out here and serves to unify all four movements. The fourth movement, Mik’hail, is a restless description of that most militaristic angel, Michael, common to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The martial sounds included muted trumpet fanfares, and the movement’s use of agitated shifting meters and driving rhythms brought the work to a triumphant end. Four Angels is pleasing to the ears in a neo-Romantic way (Adamo reportedly wanted to be a Broadway composer), but it gives the impression of being an episodic series of vignettes more than a formally unified work. With his extraordinary skill at quickly evoking different moods and characters, Adamo has likely missed his real calling, in composing film scores.

Photo of Mark Adamo by Martin Gram, courtesy of G. Schirmer, Inc.