MUSIC REVIEW : Argentine Ensemble Opens Monday Eve Concerts

A deeply serious, ultimately stimulating encounter with new music from Latin America launched the 52nd season of Monday Evening Concerts. Alicia Terzian and her Grupo Encuentros de Musica Contemporanea de Buenos Aires offered six intense, complementary pieces for a large, often restive crowd at the County Museum of Art’s Bing Theater.

But for all the drama, nervous energy and darkling mysteries of the program, the performances remained surprisingly low in energy and self-effacing--neatly done, to be sure, but almost demure in music that seemed to call for extrovert flair.

What the group is capable of in the way of focused passion became fully apparent only in the second part of the generous agenda. There, two potent, evocative vocal works framed a devastating instrumental elegy, Luis Naon’s “Tango del Desamparo.”

Snatches of taped bandoneon music suggesting Piazolla at his most mournful provided a sonic and emotional context for the rich cello of Jorge Bergero and pertinent, highly colored pianism of Claudio Espector.

Naon begins the piece as almost ritual storytelling--narrated by Bergero--of the “disappearance” of his brother during the 1976-83 Argentine military dictatorship, but words soon fail to sustain the overwhelming despair, which finds expression in lyrically yearning, fragmented and tonally skewed music.

The “Testimonial” of Aurelio de la Vega, a professor at Cal State Northridge, is a taut song cycle on poems written by Armando Valladares while imprisoned in Cuba. Three songs move from quiet doom to defiance, separated by two instrumental interludes, the first a fey scherzo in memory of Ginastera and the second a linearly dissected dirge given great poignancy by the quotation of a Cuban song.

Marta Blanco made the vocal parts emerge naturally from the instrumental web, as though the music were finding its inevitable, explicit voice. Her soft-grained mezzo did not project quite as forcefully as might be desired, but it blossomed easily in the swiftly reached final climax.

Terzian conducted the deft, well-balanced ensemble--Espector, Bergero, flutist Gabriel Sorin, clarinetist Oscar Baquedano and violinist Sergio Polizzi.

The same group, minus the flute, also gave her a rapt, fluent performance of her own “Voces,” on fragmentary texts from poets ranging from Lorca through Whitman to Tumanian.

The voices of the title appear on tape, questioned and extended by Blanco in styles ranging from folklike chants to poignant pop intimations, with distracting quasi-dramatic movement and mime. Again, she had trouble balancing the amplified instruments.

Blanco’s fearlessly dramatic abilities found more appropriate, though more self-indulgent, work in Edgar Alandia’s solo “Grito,” interpreting lines from Neruda in hoary agitprop style. Blanco rose from the floor, moaning in rags, and ended back on the ground, as an earth mother delivering the anguished cry of a repressed people.

Alejandro Iglesias Rossi’s “Canto Viejo” is a moody instrumental evocation of Quechuan ritual music, relying heavily on skillfully scored effects such as multiphonics and under-the-string ponticello bowing. Terzian and company set it out with poised deliberation.

The opening “Vox Faucibus Haesit” by Jose Luis Campana proved a cliched exercise in amplified instrumental Angst, scratchy climaxes succeeding nebulous aleatoric patches with little impact.

Grupo Encuentros offers a different program Thursday at the Campus Theatre of Cal State Northridge.