MUSIC REVIEW : A Potent U.S. Premiere for Krenek Piano Sonata

Ernst Krenek’s body of piano sonatas, spanning 69 years of composition, is as strong as any in this century. Beginning with Opus 2 in 1919, they run a wide stylistic gamut in typically tough, assertive, wholly individualistic fashion.

The seventh and latest in the series, dating from 1988, had its first U.S. performances Friday at Wright Auditorium of the Pasadena Library and Saturday at Chapman College, as the centerpiece of the Southwest Chamber Music Society’s season finale. In recent years, the society has been the most consistent keeper of the Krenek flame on the local scene, and, with the assistance of the Austrian Consulate, will offer concerts next season celebrating the composer’s 90th birthday.

In one movement, his Seventh Piano Sonata is a piece that revels in sheer sonority. Though a composer known to cover blackboards with equations worthy of a physics dissertation in explication of his works, Krenek does not subordinate the sensuous aspect of his music to the mathematical. The Seventh Sonata is a timbral wonderland, filled with strummed strings, impressionistic effects and rhythmic tappings.

The hero for the occasion was the redoubtable Gloria Cheng. Friday she gave the piece a performance centered between impulsive fantasy and incisive control. Hers was a firmly rounded reading, limited in dynamic risks but coherently shaped and propelled.

Cheng prefaced mature Krenek with the equally daunting hurdles of the young Pierre Boulez’s “Notations” and Piano Sonata No. 1. These are formative works of a 20-year-old composer, prophetic and thoroughly in character but with an exuberance often winnowed out later.

The “Notations”--the earliest work in Boulez’s catalogue--are 12 contrasting miniatures revealing the influence of Messiaen and Schoenberg. Cheng gave them a technically deft but slightly understated performance, making them seem all the more evanescent; quick takes on terse sonic ideas unencumbered by intellectual elaboration.

In comparison, the two-movement First Sonata is an epic, both in musical extension and virtuosic rhetoric. Even in these early works, Boulez was not one to let pity for the player inhibit his gladiatorial style. Cheng took up the challenge with strength and finesse, while creating plausible breathing spaces for the fey lyricism and embryonic bits of chill stasis.

At the end of this arduous, stimulating program, Albert Dominguez joined Cheng in Stravinsky’s two-piano version of “Le Sacre du Printemps.” Theirs was a completely pianistic interpretation, faithful to its kinetic roots, but rethinking balances and articulation, and tightening the extreme tempo fluctuations characteristic of the orchestral orgy approach to the popular score. The results from the pointed, alert, hard-working partnership were compelling but less than fully cathartic.