MUSIC REVIEW : California E.A.R. Unit at Cabrillo Museum

The program that Da Camera Society arranged for its Chamber Music in Historic Sites audience Sunday was intriguing and adventuresome. It began with tours of various San Pedro landmarks, and culminated in a concert by the California E.A.R. Unit at the Cabrillo Marine Museum.

Though long on watery whimsy and performed with somber virtuosity, the afternoon concert only intermittently proved an effective climax to the day. The mostly short, unrelated works did not build toward any apparent point or sound particularly inspired as individual items on a sampler.

The E.A.R. Unit received little environmental help. The museum as a whole--designed by Frank Gehry, who was on hand to offer some innocuous pre-concert anecdotes--is a friendly, functional construct. The small auditorium, however, is unusually vulnerable to extraneous sound, from parking-lot noises to roaring water pipes to ventilation hiss.

Despite all that, there was a real peak--however belated and unanticipated--in George Crumb’s “The Voice of the Whale.” The oldest (1971), longest and final piece on the agenda, “The Voice of the Whale” is a now-classic fantasy, utilizing Crumb’s whole bag of bravura tricks--timbral explorations, quotation/parody, and whistling and vocalizing.

Flutist Dorothy Stone, cellist Erika Duke and pianist Lorna Eder delivered it with poignant power in dim, blue lighting.

That was about it for special effects. John Cage’s “Inlets” provides its own visual attractions, though, as three clock-watchers diligently turn large shells filled with water. The accompanying tape, however, produced only hissing instead of a crackling fire.

The other works on the agenda with marine connections, however vague, were Arthur Jarvinen’s “The Strait of Magellan,” Boulez’s “Derive” and the three water signs from Stockhausen’s zodiacal “Tierkreis.” The later two are characteristic chamber pieces, the Stockhausen tunefully accessible, the Boulez industriously complex.

E.A.R. Uniteer Jarvinen’s opus, on the other hand, is a one-man performance-art skit, which he calls a “physical poem.” Physical, at least, it certainly was. Jarvinen did a belly-flop into a flour-and-water mess on the stage and read descriptions of the strait in a helium-induced falsetto quack. Meaning was clearly in the boggled/amused/frustrated mind of the beholder.

Steve Reich’s celebratory “Music for Pieces of Wood” and Elliott Carter’s brief, knotty “Canon for 4” completed the bill in sturdy performances.