Music Reviews : Southwest Society Opens New Schoenberg Season

The new season at the Arnold Schoenberg Institute has cast a wider net among promising local performing organizations than has been the case in past years. Monday evening, the fledgling Southwest Chamber Music Society opened the season with a characteristically bold, important program.

In its inaugural season last year, the society showed uncommon enterprise in programming and persistence in the face of initially small audiences. This year the society is back, with its own eight-concert series beginning next month.

Hornist Jeff von der Schmidt, the society’s artistic director, has championed Charles Wuorinen’s Horn Trio, playing the West Coast premiere two years ago and repeating the performance just last May. Monday, he and colleagues Kimiyo Takeya (violin) and Albert Dominguez (piano) returned to the work, with a major difference.

This performance included the world premiere of “Horn Trio Continued,” a second, parallel movement added in 1985, four years after the original trio was completed. The addition is an enrichment and an elaboration, making a sum at once more complex and comprehensible than the parts.

The occasion was significant enough to bring Wuorinen down from San Francisco. His mid-concert remarks--honoring a request, he said--were the crusty confessions of an unreconstructed serialist, belaboring the importance of Schoenberg rather than illuminating the music at hand.

The performance, however, proved a model of formal clarity and architectural expression. The sound of the ensemble could have been smoother in places, but it made Wuorinen’s knotty, firmly directed statements vigorously.

Schoenberg’s Wind Quintet, Opus 26, also received a performance more notable for ensemble integrity than individual suavity. Schmidt, flutist Dorothy Stone, oboist Stuart Horn, clarinetist Michael Grego and bassoonist Leslie Lashinsky delivered a well-drilled, purposeful reading that grew in interest and expressive depth throughout the formidable work.

Stone and Grego began the evening with an occasionally shrill, generally taut and evocative account of Elliott Carter’s brief virtuosic essay dedicated to Boulez, “Esprit rude/esprit doux.”