Music Reviews : Pacific Serenades Opens Season at Clark Library

Describing a new work as eclectic may seem backhanded, like calling a singer’s figure ample or an instrumentalist’s technique careful. But it needn’t be so.

Opening the fourth consecutive season of Pacific Serenades, impresario Mark Carlson put together a wonderful and accomplished trio of musicians in a program combining the innocent joys of Mendelssohn’s Sonata in D for cello and piano with the darker beauties of Brahms’ Trio, Opus 114.

Between these, he placed his own “The Hall of Mirrors” for clarinet and piano, a work recently completed, and dated: 1990.

It is a piece tightly structured and wound around itself, self-absorbed in a positive sense, tuneful, heartfelt in its controlled sentiment.

And harmonically old-fashioned, its ninth chords, jazzy modes and post-Straussian chromaticism placing it, stylewise, somewhere near the end of the 1940s, years before Carlson was born, and nearly five decades before its actual writing.

Yet it is a most attractive and engaging work, as the Thursday night performance by clarinetist Gary Gray and pianist Delores Stevens proved. Eclecticism in this case does not preclude genuine success at reaching and touching the listener, and giving that listener what seems like a fresh emotional experience. “The Hall of Mirrors” deserves a wide hearing.

The rest of this season-opening performance, at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library on West Adams, showed Stevens, Gray and cellist Stephen Erdody in top form, which is saying a lot.

In the Mendelssohn sonata, pianist and cellist achieved abundant beauties and urgent Romantic statement with ease, Erdody’s full, gorgeous and plangent tone ringing expressively through the Clark Library auditorium.

Brahms’ melancholy Opus 114 found the three players in complete accord: This performance--not immaculate but pristine--delivered the entire range of feelings the deceptively straightforward piece may contain.