Lukas Foss - an American Born in Berlin

Lukas Foss, who turns 85 in August and was recognized at the Rose Theater at Lincoln Center on Thursday night, has in him a little of both the American dream and the American reality.

Lukas Foss, who turns 85 in August, has in him a little of both the American dream and the American reality. He lived until 15 as a German in Berlin but has since been just about as American as an American can be. Mr. Foss was recognized at the Rose Theater at Lincoln Center on Thursday night. The music was mostly his, with Aaron Copland’s “Old American Songs” added in.

“E Pluribus Unum” is a fair description of this composer, conductor and pianist. Over the last quarter-century I have heard him writing in every imaginable style, from hard-nosed modernism to the most agreeable of accommodations with the past. Thursday’s event involved the Brooklyn Philharmonic; a flutist, Carol Wincenc; a conductor, Mark Mangini; four singers; and two choruses.

This collection of pieces represented Mr. Foss in his pastoral mode. “The Prairie,” a kind of cantata based on Carl Sandburg’s poetry, was Mr. Foss’s introduction to wide celebrity. In 1944 he was newly a citizen, and the country was at war. The seven sections of “The Prairie” make their obeisances to Copland, a friend, colleague and the inventor of an American style featuring hollow spacings of chords, modal melody and a variety of dance styles that exude simplicity but are anything but simple.

Mr. Foss’s Americanisms are gracefully handled, and his off-kilter rhythms have an originality and self-assurance about them.

Of the four vocal soloists, Gerard Powers offered a tenor that was especially clear and clean. The others, all good, were Elizabeth Farnham, Julia Spanja and Robert Osborne.

The chorus part brought together the Choral Society of the Hamptons and the Greenwich Village Singers. Together they sang with a pleasant vagueness, a quality common to the species of volunteer choruses that exist as much for the recreation of the participants as for their audience.

The “Renaissance Concerto” for flute and orchestra, with the ever excellent Ms. Wincenc, takes its title more or less literally. Gestures, language and instrumentation conduct the listener on a walking tour of Monteverdi, Rameau and Gesualdo, with Mr. Foss’s updated thoughts on his predecessors as color commentary.

The Brooklyn Philharmonic, cut down to chamber proportions, sounded unrehearsed but got by. “Old American Songs” had much the same quality.

The Foss tribute is to be repeated at the Channing Sculpture Garden in Bridgehampton, N.Y., next Saturday.

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