MUSIC REVIEW : Southwest Chamber in Santa Ana

The Southwest Chamber Music Society has cast its net wide in an effort to reach the public. Each of its concerts is played in three locations: Santa Ana, Claremont and Pasadena. But, so far, the plucky, year-old, ad hoc group--the number of musicians varies according to the program--appears to be struggling in attracting audiences.

If the music-making Sunday at Santa Ana High School is typical of its programs, that lack is our loss.

About 30 people gave up the chance to bask in mid-afternoon sunshine to hear flutist Dorothy Stone, violinist Kimiyo Takeya, violist Jan Karlin, cellist Erika Duke and pianist Albert Dominguez give first-rate performances of works by Falla, Copland and Halsey Stevens.

The small numbers in the cavernous 1,500-seat hall created atypical acoustical problems. In two solos, Dominguez sounded as if he had a heavy pedal foot, though he did not. Imbalances between flute and the string trio were pointed in Stevens’ Quintet for Flute and Piano Quartet.

Still, Stevens’ work, written in an accessible diatonic language, properly emerged as a dramatic journey from deceptive simplicity to visionary boldness. In the Pastoral movement, Stone traced the opening theme with easy expansiveness; in their muted passages, the string trio evoked the most delicate colors of medieval stained glass, and Dominguez contributed confident strength.

In the reticent Threnody, the ensemble proved poised and lyrical, and commanding in the final assertions of the Fugue. And when the work stepped back into the shadows in the Epilogue, the players pursued the composer’s contemplations to near-mystical intensity before the closing images of diffusion and dissolution.

Stevens, 79 and confined to a wheelchair, was in the audience and received enthusiastic applause.

Insofar as one could discern in the hollow, echoing hall, Dominguez expertly captured the robust rhythms, languid sensuality and delicacies of color in Falla’s “Pieces espagnoles” and the fiendishly difficult “Fantasia betica.”

The string trio played with vibrancy and warmth and Dominguez with pastel colors in the outer movements of Copland’s Quartet for Piano and Strings, and with vivid rhythms and bold statements in the central Scherzo.