MUSIC REVIEW : Powell Quartet Introduced to La Jolla at SummerFest ’89

Living composers and chamber music series do not usually seek each other out--especially at the ultraconservative SummerFest series, this month in its fourth incarnation here.

One active composer, CalArts professor and former jazz pianist Mel Powell, broke that tradition Sunday night at the third event of SummerFest ’89. (The series continues through next Sunday.)

Powell attended a rousing, touching and apparently expert performance of his complex String Quartet (1982) by the Colorado Quartet, prefacing it with an amusing and provocative half-hour talk.

This rambling introduction was fun, but not necessary. As Powell acknowledged during its length, “Music is autonomous--it can speak for itself.”

And the 7-year-old work, being heard in San Diego County for the first time, does exactly that--surprisingly, in the rigorous language of the Second Viennese School, the style of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. It might have been written 70 years ago.

Emotionally charged, and moving from active contemplation, through heat and violence, toward a final, poignant reflectiveness, the 13-minute piece proceeds inexorably through a varied and vivid scenario. The ensemble--violinists Julie Rosenfeld and Debra Redding, violist Francesca Martin and cellist Diane Chaplin--achieved an admirable plateau of concentration in this performance.

Similar plateaus materialized in the surrounding works, Brahms’ early piano Quintet in F minor and Debussy’s late Cello Sonata (1915).

Substituting for Andre Previn--reportedly still suffering a painful bout of tendinitis--pianist Yefim Bronfman presided over a magisterial but spontaneous reading of the Brahms work in which his colleagues were violinists Andres Cardenes and Debra Redding, violist Heiichiro Ohyana (director of this festival since its beginning in 1986) and cellist Gary Hoffman.

Despite the recalcitrance of a piano with the double and paradoxical disadvantage of an overbright sound and a pronounced lack of resonance, Bronfman and friends combined in this reading an easy authority with a passionate response to the Brahmsian drama.

After a Classically balanced opening Allegro, the ensemble displayed a sense of discovery in each of the succeeding movements, which unfolded in felicitous and energetic contrasts.

To begin this program, cellist Hoffman, with David Golub at the piano--complementary and generous partners--gave an exceptionally lucid, articulate and persuasively linear performance of the familiar Debussy Sonata, one which actually set up the emotional resonances to come in the Powell and Brahms Works.