Music Reviews : CalArts Players Open American Chamber Series

Friday evening, the New CalArts Twentieth Century Players launched an odd little weekend concert series in the odd little off-campus location of the Santa Monica Museum of Art. The series promised Masterworks of American Chamber Music, with the first installment subtitled Grass Roots.

What we heard was an amiable gathering of neoclassic motley, with the craggy, crabby exception of Roger Sessions’ Five Pieces for Piano. The Copland-Piston-Porter-Harris balance could arguably be taken to represent a sort of musical Populism, but masterworks is a rather strong term for the lot.

The ever formidably focused Bryan Pezzone played Sessions’ pungent, pointed pieces with interpretive vigor and technical assurance. He made the rafters of the boomy warehouse structure ring, while indicating interrelationships and illuminating structural detail.

From there the concert took a slack turn through Walter Piston’s early, innocently jazzy Three Pieces for Flute, Clarinet and Bassoon, and Quincy Porter’s rambling, folk-music reminiscent Duo for Viola and Harp. The fluent performances could not ennoble the facile music.

Roy Harris’ Concerto for Piano, Clarinet and String Quartet may just be a masterwork, albeit a minor and generally ignored one. Soloist Pezzone and William Powell and a capable quartet projected its Romantic strengths clearly, except in the fugal finale, where the dense, awkwardly voiced textures thwarted them. There is power in this four-movement piece, and individuality if not originality.

Copland’s two Threnodies opened the program, in elegant, austere performances headed by flutist Rachel Rudich.