MUSIC AND DANCE REVIEWS : SINFONOVA PLAYS ARMENIAN WORKS

With a program of severe, uncompromising, even bleak music, the 3-year-old Boston-based SinfoNova Chamber Orchestra made a brilliant local debut Sunday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Led by a fiercely intense Aram Gharabekian, the 22-member ensemble brought unquestionable authority, precision and luminous string tone to four works--three commissioned by the group and all reportedly West Coast premieres.

The concert, presented by the the Armenian American Theatrical Musical Society, not surprisingly emphasized works by Armenian composers, with Haroutiun Delallian’s ambitious “Topophono” chamber concerto for string orchestra, piano and horn even professing to be “an abstract depiction of Armenian history.”

If so, it was not blindly patriotic. This dark yet celebratory work--featuring pianist Avo Kuyumjian and horn player Nona Gainsforth--built tense, complex sonorities on long-held pedal points and, later, became obsessed with festive folk rhythms (the players moving about the stage). The merrymaking was slammed dead by a quotation from Chopin’s “Funeral” Sonata, then briefly revived but finally silenced by the frail sounds of an offstage horn doubled by viola. Not much comfort here.

Also taxing but brought off without effort were William Thomas McKinley’s close-textured, formally structured “SinfoNova”; Thomas Oboe Lee’s slyly rhythmic “Morango . . . almost a tango,” and Edward Mirzoyan’s vigorous, if derivative Symphony for string orchestra and timpani (1962).