PIERCE PREMIERE : SATORI QUARTET IN SERENADES SERIES

Pacific Serenades is yet another organization attempting to find a niche in the local chamber music habitat. Each “serenade,” presented first in a private home, then at the Morgan-Wixson Theater in Santa Monica, features a newly commissioned work by a California-based composer.

Wednesday at the Morgan-Wixson, Four Movements for String Quartet by Alexandra Pierce, professor of music at the University of Redlands, were the center of efforts by the Satori Quartet.

Pierce’s moody character pieces, each with its own title, develop conservatively. The textures are simple, with many doublings and unison gestures. The third, “The Secret Sharer,” seemed the most richly endowed, in structure, contrapuntal independence and melodic nuance.

Although Pierce shunned timbral experimentation and bravura writing, her movements revealed an affection for string sonorities. The Satori--violinists Murray Adler and Peter Kent, violist Pamela Goldsmith, cellist Frederick Seykora--gave them strong, clearly shaped readings.

Balances suffered, however, from Adler’s determination to be always in the foreground. He looks a bit like a young Robert Mann, and shares some of the Juilliard leader’s more abrasive musical characteristics.

Perhaps, simply, Adler was seated in a remarkably live spot of the intimate theater. At any rate, his clipped, excitable playing also dominated the repertory standards completing the program. Haydn’s Quartet in G, Opus 54, No. 1, became a loud, fast violin concerto, with little depth of expression or ensemble finesse.

Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” Quartet benefited even less from this athletic, monodimensional approach. There is more to it than just the first violin part, flashy as that often is, but little else emerged convincingly.