MUSIC REVIEW : Composers Group Showcases Winning Works

Pacific Composers Forum has found an amiable new home at the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum. The program Thursday of winning works from its fourth annual composition competition, inaugurated a series of concerts and workshops at the museum by the group.

The 215-seat Wells Fargo Theater is a comfortable and eminently functional hall for chamber music, even if the lights did suddenly go out in the middle of one piece. The sound is clear, sight lines are unimpaired and the atmosphere is welcoming.

The Composers Forum matched the surroundings with a generous roster of eight airy, pleasant pieces of largely neo-classical persuasion. Los Angeles Philharmonic pianist Zita Carno led a small contingent of Philharmonic and studio stalwarts in respectable performances.

Alas, the virtues of attractiveness and craft--though not to be taken for granted these days--proved to be simply their own rewards. Little demand was placed on either ear or mind.

The striking exception to the rule of pretty was Jonathan Sacks’ austere, eloquent Variations and Chorale, “Accursed, Ye Shall Glimpse Heaven.” Bassoonist Charles Fernandez had the lead in this mixed quartet, and gave the still, floating theme its due in supple inflection.

Fernandez’s own Fantasia, another piano-based quartet, had the character of movie chase music, with crisply hocketing passages and lyrical interludes featuring Carol Drake’s mellow, pointed French horn work. The “Roumania” movement of Mark Ruttle’s Chamber Concerto, “Freedom 1990,” had similar effects, marked by allusions to Bartok.

The other up-tempo bustler was William Goldstein’s “Something Whimsical,” for traditional piano quartet. At the end of a long evening, it lived up to its title, despite an occasionally scrambled performance.

“The Peterboro Letters,” by Lynne Palmer Warren, topped the list of pastoral entries. A symmetrically shaped tone poem for mixed septet, it glowed with relaxed, Coplandesque nostalgia.

Carno conducted the only piece she didn’t play in, Andrew Shapero’s neo-modal “Music for Quintet,” distinguished by oboist Jon Clarke’s elegantly extended phrasing. The intermittently unfocused playing of violinist Lawrence Sonderling only intensified the soporific effect of John Alan Cohan’s five gentle “Fairy Tale Portraits.”

Carno accompanied the “Portraits” with the pertinent musicality she brought to the whole agenda. Chief of her many brilliantly realized solo opportunities was the outer movements of Michael Deak’s “Contrasts” Sonata, a big, serious and virtuosic hommage to Hindemith and Ravel, ennobled far beyond its own merits by Carno’s artistry.