Southwest Chamber Music Program

The Southwest Chamber Music Society apparently doesn’t want to know about the word routine. That was the impression left by its refreshingly eclectic program Thursday night in Chapman College’s Salmon Recital Hall (and repeated Friday at the Pasadena Library).

Unusual instrumental combinations dominated this outing, beginning with Reger’s delightful Serenade for flute, violin and viola, Opus 141a, a dashing, rambunctious, richly harmonized piece that ought to be better known. Flutist Dorothy Stone, violinist Peter Marsh and violist Jan Karlin checked in with a rough yet lively reading that often tumbled headlong through Reger’s difficult writing.

Next were two demonstrations of sheer compositional genius with a minimum of means in Britten’s quirky, humorous, sometimes self-absorbed “Six Metamorphoses After Ovid” for solo oboe, and the amazing contrapuntal interplay within Mozart’s Duo for violin and viola, K. 424.

Oboist Stuart Horn displayed a firm, liquid, legato tone in Britten’s soliloquy, and he was undaunted by a beeper that went off in the audience in mid-piece. In the Mozart, played by Marsh and Karlin, one could almost overlook Marsh’s frequent lapses in tuning, for the two were carrying on a joyous musical dialogue where feeling triumphed over technical shortcomings.

In contrast to Britten’s inventiveness with solo winds, Alexander Goehr’s Paraphrase on Monteverdi’s “Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda” for clarinet was a typically loose-jointed, rambling exercise that quickly exhausted one’s patience. Clarinetist Michael Grego ably coped with its angular writing, frequent pauses, and fashionable tapping of the keys.

But Goehr’s arid landscape was quickly washed away by Prokofiev’s wonderfully savage Quintet in G minor, a product of the early 1920s that reminds the listener of the acidic Second Symphony.

With its odd instrumental lineup (oboe, clarinet, violin, viola, bass), abrasive drones and lurching rhythms, the piece can’t help but summon images of Stravinsky peering over Prokofiev’s shoulder. Here, double bassist Paul Zibits joined Marsh, Karlin, Horn and Grego in a zesty performance made all the more effective by its rough edges.