Dance and Music Reviews : Southwest Chamber Promising in Pasadena

Tucked away in a cozy small hall known as Wright Auditorium at the side and rear of the Pasadena Library, a new group that calls itself the Southwest Chamber Music Society presented its credentials in a concert Friday night. They can at once be awarded a passing grade, though with certain reservations.

The complete personnel enlists piano (Albert Dominguez), two violins (Kimio Takeya, Jacqueline Brand), viola (Jan Karlind), cello (Richard Treat) and a reciter (Leroy Southers), with Jeff von der Schmidt to conduct when needed.

So flexible a group can explore a wide range of repertory, and that appears what the group intends to do. They opened with a Trio by Joseph Haydn, which might seem to be a very cliche of tradition, except that this Trio is in the remote and seldom employed of E flat minor and consists of only two movements. Dominguez, Takeya, and Treat seemed to discover its ready possibilities, though they were neither very numerous nor particularly distinctive.

The disputable portion of the program involved Schoenberg’s “Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte” for string quartet reciter and piano, Opus 41.

The work, a setting of Lord Byron’s stiffly rhetorical poem published anonymously in 1814, is not “easy” Schoenberg, neither is it extremely inaccessible, and it exploits another favorite Schoenberg invention, the “Sprechgesang” which demands that a speaking voice operate under more or less musical directions.

Southers’ reading of the text seemed cautiously to observe all the composer’s specifications, though the effort gained little in eloquence thereby. Dominguez seemed to strike a proper balance in his treatment of the piano part, but the string players were too often submerged in their own caution.

All the separate parts came together quite handsomely in the concluding piano Quintet in F minor, Opus 34, by Brahms. Dominguez’s unobtrusive authority controled dynamics and basic warmth guided the string players through an interpretation well planned and serenely controlled, if without all the requisite abandon and spontaneity. But, for the group as a whole, it was a commendable achievement that promises well for the future.