MUSIC REVIEW : XTET in Local Premiere of ‘Hyde’

Musical humor comes in many guises, some of them subtle indeed. But there is a broader school as well, of wrong-note double takes and pratfalls in sound.

On the evidence of his “Hyde and Jekyll,” Jon Deak belongs to the latter. Monday evening at the County Museum of Art, Xtet gave the raucous work its local premiere.

“Hyde and Jekyll” is a rowdy relic--a Keystone Cops flick without the pictures or Spike Jones with supertitles. Deak borrowed little more than the names and the idea of character reversal from Stevenson in creating his Mad Magazine scenario. His score of rude noises and cheesy Romantic exaggerations plays off mock cartoon captions, projected on a screen behind the large ensemble.

Xtet, a locally based chamber music collective, held nothing back in a performance of boisterous bravura. Cellist Roger Lebow musically portrayed the dumb doctor with ripe rhetoric, and Ned Treuenfels smoothly represented the heavy-breathing Hyde with his horn.

The program began with Toch’s popular “Geographical Fugue,” musically and comically more sophisticated than “Hyde and Jekyll,” though you would never know that from the coarsely balanced, shouted enthusiasm from these 15 musicians. The counterpoint was reduced to exaggerated head motives and there was scant shape to the reading.

It was at least spirited. Six members of the group followed it up with a diffuse, muted account of Toch’s Dance Suite from 1930. This is the season of the Toch centennial, but neither the piece nor the performance greatly honored the composer.

Nicholas Thorne’s four “Songs from the Mountain,” on his own naive and sentimental poems, meandered moodily in rich, coloristic settings. The ensemble accompaniments, for a mixed sextet, provided a supportive, evocative framework, reminiscent in the last two songs of George Crumb. Soprano Daisietta Kim sang this West Coast premiere, with forced sound and wide vibrato in the climaxes, and nicely turned quasi-parlando in lower-lying passages.

Alfred Schnittke’s sonorous, chant-based Hymn I completed the program, in a stern, convincing performance by Lebow, harpist JoAnn Turovsky and timpanist Leon Milo.