MUSIC REVIEW : SDSU Wind Quintet Glows in Both Technique, Spirit

Consulting this week’s local musical calendar, it would be difficult to ascertain that Nov. 7-13 is American Music Week. Despite their colleagues’ benign neglect of the native muse, the Stauffer Wind Quintet rose to the occasion with an all-American program Tuesday evening at San Diego State University’s Smith Recital Hall.

If Stauffer’s program was short and undemanding of the listener--nothing recent or tonally disconcerting was included--the level of performance was of the highest caliber. Formed just two years ago as the university’s resident quintet, Stauffer has polished its ensemble technique to a high luster, yet its playing lacked neither spirit nor conviction.

Of the half-a-dozen works selected for this concert, Samuel Barber’s “Summer Music” soared above the neoclassical essays by Vincent Persichetti, William Bergsma and Leon Stein. The performers made the most of Barber’s plangent themes and rich texture, and did not stint on the work’s poignant emotional breadth.

While oboist Peggy Michel distinguished herself with numerous delectable, shapely solos in the Barber, all players carried out their responsibilities with aplomb. Indeed, the quintet’s hallmark is an uncanny balance and stylistic unanimity among the players.

Stauffer invited saxophonist James Rotter to join the ensemble in Stein’s infrequently programmed Sextet for Alto Saxophone and Wind Quintet. Although Rotter’s burnished timbre and subtle vibrato pleasantly complemented the wind ensemble, his technical finesse could not infuse the piece with a gravity or depth the composer left out.

Although Stein’s 1958 opus was more compelling and more thematically inventive than Bergsma’s 1958 Concerto for Wind Quintet, both works sounded constrained by the stylistic conventions of neoclassicism. This pair of works served as a reminder that the academically respectable idiom of postwar America timidly rehashed the ideas Stravinsky and Hindemith found invigorating in the 1920s. Stein was in the audience to accept kudos after the performance of Sextet.

Gunther Schuller’s first published work, his 1945 Suite, provided a modest contrast of idiom with its gentle jazz borrowings. Stauffer gave this unpretentious piece an aptly whimsical, deft performance, figuratively winking at the audience in the bluesy middle movement.

The program opened with Persichetti’s Pastorale, a genial occasional piece, and closed with Johns Barrows’ jaunty, slightly virtuoso March. The other members of the Stauffer Quintet are flutist Linda Lukas, clarinetist Marian Liebowitz, French horn player John Lorge and bassoonist Dennis Michel.