Music Reviews : Premiere of Kraft’s ‘Quartet for Love of Time’ at USC

On a multiple commission from chamber-music series in Oregon, Florida and Ohio, William Kraft last year wrote “Quartet for the Love of Time” as a companion piece to Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” (1940). Utilizing the same forces as that beloved wartime relic--clarinet, violin, piano and cello--the newer work is both an homage and a departure.

Heard in its first Los Angeles performance Tuesday night in acoustically refurbished Hancock Auditorium, USC, Kraft’s 12-minute piece shows the California-based composer’s familiar virtues: an apprehensible sense of continuity, strong musical statements made cogently, idiomatic but compelling instrumental writing. The players, members of the USC Contemporary Music Ensemble, were violinist Kurt Sprenger, clarinetist Michael Grego, cellist Timothy Landauer and pianist Vicki Ray; their performance had the ring of conviction.

The first of Kraft’s two movements brings to mind a promenade through a haunted house; the second adds quickness, more forebodings, a hint of whistling-through-fear. The entire piece--in a middle-of-the-road atonal style--seems to invite the visual accompaniment of dance.

The other novelty on this agenda--which showed off promisingly the new and brighter sound-profile of Hancock Auditorium--was a revival of the chamber version (1960) of Lukas Foss’ still-wondrous, post-Mahlerian “Time Cycle.” The authoritative reading produced by guest soprano Jane Thorngren, conductor Donald Crockett and Grego, Ray, cellist Wanda Glowacka and percussionist Mark Nicolay both outlined the glowing exterior charms of the piece and underlined some of its pointed details. Thorngren’s plangent voice added a dimension of meaning to the enigmatic texts.

Earlier, there was an expert run-through of Anton von Webern’s predictably compressed, surprisingly chatty Quartet, Opus 22, by violinist J. Calvin Dyck, clarinetist Grego, saxophonist Charly Langer and pianist Gloria Cheng. The program began with Ives’ still-surreal “Set of Pieces for Theater Orchestra” (1904-11), conducted by Crockett.