Music Reviews : Three New World Chamber Ensembles at UCI

A flurry of chamber music activity has changed the listener’s landscape in this early summer of 1988. The L.A. Philharmonic sponsors two separate chamber series, one outdoor, one in, and a promising international roster gives concerts under the List-Glenn Institute banner at Cal State L.A. In addition, in once-summertime-deprived Orange County, the New World Festival offers indoor chamber music (ending next week).

Thursday night in Village Theatre at UC Irvine, ensembles from the New World Symphony gave the second event in that series: performances of works by Mozart, Dahl and Schubert. As far as they went, these readings showed the players’ incipient skills and unfazeable technical prowess. All they lacked were strong viewpoints, deep musical probing and the mellowness of experience.

Our youngest musical generation has discovered segregation, it would seem: The ensembles in Mozart’s C-minor Serenade, K. 388, and Dahl’s Music for Brass Instruments (1944) were exclusively male, that in Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet, female. It would be hasty to assume that the limitations of the performances had something to do with the lack of sex-integration--yet, limited they certainly were.

Underrehearsal and undercoaching may have been the real villains here. The playing sailed along, but without providing aural subtext or emotional resonance.

In the “Trout” Quintet, the lack of a leader became the urgent business at hand. Each of the players--violinist Beth Woodside, violist Barbara Corbato, cellist Diane Barere, bassist Martha Schimelpfenig and pianist Nina Scolnik--displayed expertise, but never took the reins. If this event had been planned to show off the clear accomplishments of Scolnik--a member of the UCI faculty and the only guest on the program--it was only partially successful.

The male half of the proceedings had an air of grim determination about it--the players wore mostly dark suits, ties and unsmiling faces. Still, the octet of players in the Serenade and the sextet in Dahl’s cherishable piece at least acknowledged the range of colors and moods inherent in these scores.