SAN DIEGO COUNTY : MUSIC REVIEW : Soviet Composers Dominate SONOR’s Chamber Concert

SONOR, UC San Diego’s contemporary music ensemble, doffed its big fur cap to the Soviet arts festival Wednesday night at Mandeville Auditorium. On SONOR’s first concert of the season, three chamber works by contemporary Soviet composers dominated the well-prepared program. Although such a modest sampling can hardly sum up current trends in Soviet music, these refreshing, unfamiliar voices reveal a tradition that has not forgotten the listener in the compositional equation.

Elena Firsnova’s rhapsodic “Forest Walks” (1987) for soprano and seven instruments made the strongest impression, due in part to Constance Lawthers’ rich, dramatic vocal contribution. She gave the composer’s soaring, operatic declamation an urgency that aptly illumined the somber Russian poetic text. If Firsnova’s harmonic idiom was conservative for such a recent piece, her textures were subtly and effectively structured.

More solemn were two instrumental essays by Alfred Schnittke, “Hymn II” and “Hymn III.” These smaller works from the 1970s only hinted at the composer’s craft and depth of feeling communicated in his more recent Third String Quartet, which was performed in this same hall a few weeks ago by the visiting Auryn Quartet.

Edison Denisov’s name regularly appears on the short list of the most important current Soviet composers. His three movement Chamber Symphony (1982) for 12 instruments revealed a closet melodist posing as a demure disciple of Arnold Schoenberg. Denisov wrapped his serious but unabrasive work in a colorful orchestration, with sympathetic solos for piano and vibraphone.

A well-chosen complement to the Chamber Symphony was Mel Powell’s “Settings for Soprano and Chamber Group” (1979), although the Southern California composer’s understated and economical atonal style is more clearly indebted to Schoenberg than is Denisov’s. Soprano Carol Plantamura sang the fragmented texts with calculated detachment.

If the unmistakable Oriental impressionism of Toru Takemitsu’s “Rain Coming” opened the concert graciously, Ben Johnston’s “Two Sonnets of Shakespeare” was the evening’s sole cipher. This academic exercise of hothouse expressionism obscured the Bard’s poetry instead of enriching it.