Music and Dance Reviews : Fine Arts Quintet Closes Historic Sites Season

If string quartets are the prima donnas of chamber music, brass quintets are the doormen: always present, usually standing guard, seldom treated to star status.

The condition is historical. As far back as the 16th Century, brass ensembles have provided the live Muzak by which Western civilization moved forward. Only in our century have we begrudgingly accorded wind bands a state of semi-respectability.

Complete acceptance may still await, but in some circles, the brass ensemble is cherished. The Fine Arts Quintet, for example, a Los Angeles-based group of striking accomplishment, was greeted cordially, Sunday afternoon, when it closed the 1987-88 season of Chamber Music in Historic Sites.

The setting was the Earl C. Anthony House in Los Feliz, and the program, given on the stone porch overlooking a formal garden with a sunny view eastward to Glendale and Pasadena, concentrated on the two-century span between Michael Praetorius and J. S. Bach.

Trumpeters Anthony Plog and Patrick Kunkee, hornist James Atkinson and trombonists James Sawyer and J. Alan Johnson brought style and contrast to this varied agenda of mostly dances. An arrangement of a suite from Praetorius’ “Terpsichore” provided the colorful centerpiece of the program, while three excerpts from Bach’s “Art of Fugue” made up its climax.

In between, there was a commanding show of virtuosity, matching tone and musical integrity in brief but characterful and pungent pieces by Matthew Locke, Johann Pezel and Pietro Lappi, among others. Civilized delights, indeed.