Music Reviews : Chamber Program Honors Ernst Krenek

On Aug. 23, Ernst Krenek, virtually the last major surviving member of his generation of Viennese composers, turned 90 years old. Though lionized in his native Austria, he remains an obscure figure in America, where he has lived for the last 52 years.

Nevertheless, USC’s Arnold Schoenberg Institute assembled a slightly late birthday present Wednesday night, a concert of some of his uncompromising chamber music. The composer journeyed from his Palm Springs home to take it in, even contributing some often witty program notes to the occasion.

The early Toccata und Chaconne (1922)--played with steel-fingered brilliance by pianist Delores Stevens--is a huge, earnest, turbulent, often drivingly rhythmic tour-de-force, an astonishingly self-confident work for a 22-year-old. Stevens returned to accompany oboist Joel Timm in Four Pieces for Oboe and Piano (1966), a quartet of brief, crabbed sonic snapshots that exploit squalling multiphonics and other advanced techniques from the oboe.

The spiky song cycle “Spatlese” (1973) uses the seemingly innocuous vision of late-maturing wine grapes as a metaphorical springboard for agonized ruminations on writing and life. Michael Ingham skillfully drove his robust baritone toward extremes of temperament without going over the edge, as did pianist Charlotte Zelka with Krenek’s barbaric tone clusters.

Zelka also was in charge of the Fifth Piano Sonata, another tough yet amazingly dramatic opus of hammering aggression and mysterious glissandos that was written for her in 1950.