Home Run for a Pinch-Hit Pianist

“It was like coming out of the stands to get the game-winning hit in a World Series game,” pianist Jerry Kuderna said of his “pinch-hit” performance last Sunday at the County Museum of Art’s SCREAM concert. Kuderna, who was in the audience to hear composer Milton Babbitt’s complex 8 1/2-minute “Reflections,” ended up playing it.

The scheduled performer, citing the difficulty posed by the composition’s absence of melodic structure, had bowed out and the piece had been canceled.

Kuderna’s substitute performance earned praise: Gregg Wager wrote in a Times review that the San Francisco pianist “overcame the serial intricacies of the score with comprehensive expertise.”

SCREAM stands for Southern California Resource for Electro-Acoustic Music. In this form, traditional instruments are backed by synthesized music.

Kuderna, 41, was attending the all-day lecture and performance with friends. “I decided to take (the scores of) a couple of Babbitt’s pieces with me to show his work to the people I was with. I thought maybe we could follow along as the pieces were played. One of these pieces happened to be ‘Reflections.’

“When it was announced that the piece had been canceled I thought: ‘Should I do this?’ I know Milton, so I went up and asked him if I could play it, and we went from there.”

After two hours’ rehearsal, Kuderna found himself playing a piece that he had performed in public only eight times, the last time 1 1/2 years ago.

One reason the piece is so difficult to play is that it is performed in synchronization with a tape recording; Kuderna says he turned this into an advantage.

“With the tape there, it’s as if I wasn’t out there alone,” he said. “While playing, it seemed like everything was going in slow motion . . . that I had all the time in the world. So much of performing is mental, and once I got past that state, it was like once you learn the piece, you never forget it.”

For Kuderna, who studied at Juilliard, taught at Princeton and wrote a doctoral dissertation on Babbitt, the performance was a first. “I almost conducted a performance of ‘Peter and the Wolf’ on a moment’s notice, but I’ve never done anything like this,” he said.

And what does Kuderna think about future spontaneous concerts? “Sure, I would do it again. It would be great. You could feel the drama and enjoyment,” he said. “But I think this was just a very special thing for me and the 150 people who were there. . . .”

Returning to Mary Chapel at Mount St. Mary’s College in Brentwood this week, the West Germany-based medieval ensemble Sequentia will offer a new program, “Singing Stones: Music for a Romanesque Church.”

Sequentia founder Benjamin Bagby says “Singing Stones” refers to the acoustics of Romanesque houses of worship, “where the walls and their reverberation--the acoustics of the church--are an integral part of the sound of this music.

“To perform it anywhere else, in a room without such reverberance, is comparable to taking the back off a violin. The sound is completely different.”

Bagby and Barbara Thornton, two Americans, founded Sequentia while living in Basle, Switzerland, in 1977; today, their residence is Cologne. From there, they tour Europe steadily and two or three times a year travel to the United States. Sequentia is an ensemble of flexible size and personnel. “We are basically two singers and a number of guest artists. We tour in trios, quartets and larger units,” said Bagby.

Opening their current tour Wednesday night at 8 on a Chamber Music in Historic Sites program, Sequentia this week consists of Bagby, plus five East Coast-based American singers: William Hite, Frank Kelley, David Ripley, William Sharp and Sanford Sylvan.

Bagby & Co. have put together a program of monophonic and polyphonic pieces from the churches and monasteries of 12th and 13th-Century France and England.

OTHER CHAMBERS: A welcome rash of chamber-music performances fills this week. Some of the promising events (details may be found in the Listings, adjacent): The Emerson Quartet plays today at 4 at UCLA. . . . Tonight in the Chandelier Room at the Turf Club at Santa Anita racetrack the Angeles Quartet appears on the Chamber Music in Historic Sites series. First post is at 8 p.m. . . . The New World String Quartet plays twice this week, Wednesday night for Music Guild and Friday night at Mount St. Mary’s College, downtown . . . . Trio Basso, an ensemble combining viola, cello and double bass, makes its Los Angeles debut Wednesday. The trio from Cologne will introduce music by Brandmuller, Hespos, Huber, Kagel, Rihm and Rose . . . Finally, two Saturday concerts: Violinist Murray Adler, cellist Frederick Seykora and pianist Chet Swiatkowski play at 3 in Mount St. Mary’s College Theater in Brentwood, while violinist Joseph Genualdi and pianist James Bonn appear at 8 p.m. in the Little Theater at Cal State Northridge.