MUSIC REVIEW : Southwest Chamber Explores the Dark Side

ORANGE —  Although the Southwest Chamber Music Society did not offer the works in its Friday program in chronological order, a thread of Viennese-rooted music history could easily be followed--Brahms’ dark, sensual chromaticism, Berg’s early moodiness straining at tonal confinement and Krenek’s angular, challenging atonalism.

Among the three 20th-Century works presented in Bertea Hall at Chapman University, Ernst Krenek’s “Zwei Zeitlieder,” settings of provocative poems by Renata Pandula, held sway. Soprano Kathleen Roland dominated the dramatic performance, while the Southwest String Quartet punctuated with evocative--and technique stretching--empathy.

“String Trio in Twelve Stations,” Opus 237, written when Krenek was in his 80s, and given its U.S. premiere in 1988 by the Southwest String Quartet, does not owe its title to its dodecaphonic inclinations, but--in the composer’s words--to “the fact that I started the work at 12 different points and later welded these fragments into one unit.”

The quartet--violinists Peter Marsh and Susan Jensen, violist Jan Karlin and cellist Leighton Fong (who has replaced Roger Lebow)--convincingly knitted together Krenek’s lean polyphonic snippets, merging them into driving, homophonic passages and somber interludes. Individually, they soared morbid melodies over nervous accompaniments. The four players, with soprano Phyllis Bryn-Julson, will record both Krenek pieces for CRI.

Pianist Vicki Ray joined the quartet to give Brahms’ Quintet for Piano and Strings, Opus 34, a bold, reading, highlighted by striking, interpretive agreement between Fong and Marsh, but longing for exploration of coloristic possibilities and sensitive flexibility in pacing. Ray had begun the program with Berg’s moody and expressive Sonata for Piano, his Opus 1, which she delivered with commanding equanimity.