Music Reviews : Stacy and Swartz in Reseda Recital

For the listening commonalty, English horn and organ are not exactly the most familiar of recital combinations. They work quite amiably, however, as Thomas Stacy and Samuel John Swartz proved Sunday evening at Trinity Lutheran Church in Reseda with a short program of contemporary pieces.

The recital opened the 10th annual seminar, which Stacy--principal English horn with the New York Philharmonic, peripatetic teacher and instrumental missionary--will be giving this week at Cal State Northridge (where Swartz teaches).

Mellifluous melancholy is the English horn’s main orchestral stock in trade, but Stacy demonstrated a much wider range of expression and sound. He could make the horn sing with almost human suavity, or stutter with martial brilliance, all supported by the booming acoustic of the Trinity sanctuary.

Gardner Read’s “Phantasmagoria” gave Stacy the most striking opportunities for stereotypical moodiness, plus requiring him to switch to oboe and oboe d’amore. He handled all three instruments, and Read’s protean technical demands, with equal aplomb.

Daniel Pinkham’s “For Evening Draws On” added an atmospheric tape part to the mix in an evocative bit of night-music. Calvin Hampton’s fluent Variations on “Amazing Grace” encompassed the gamut of technique and range in thoroughly engaging, accessible fashion, while Leo Sowerby’s pastoral Ballade and Jan Koetsier’s neo-Classical Partita mined more conservative but still productive veins.

Swartz’s partnership, on a modest two-manual Schantz organ, was always balanced and apt. Koetsier’s Partita and Hampton’s Variations place equal demands on both players, and Swartz made sure his efforts matched those of Stacy in musicality and verve.