Music Review : Promising Lo Cal Composers at Zola Fine Arts

Launched with fanfares, nurtured by distinguished mentors, Lo Cal Composers began life six autumns ago with many advantages. This week, beginning its seventh season--now at its new home base at Zola Fine Arts in Hollywood--the consortium of young music-makers displayed some of those advantages again.

No longer callow postgraduates--the original group was made up of former UCLA students--the current musicians of Lo Cal Composers Ensemble (its name has been lengthened) are six thirtysomethings from diverse geographical and academic backgrounds. But promise is still their distinction

Zola Fine Arts is a squarish gallery, two steps up from Melrose Avenue, with white-brick, art-hung walls which project music efficiently. The music projected Tuesday night was a generous, two-hour program showcasing pieces by the six Lo Cal members--Joel Hamilton, Chris Guardino, Carlos Rodriguez, Enrique Gonzalez, Jane Brockman and Murielle Hodler-Hamilton--and two guest composers, Joel Kabakov and Leonard Rosenman.

From the evidence of these apparently fair performances, the most strikingly gifted of the resident writers may be Rodriguez. His “Crater Lizards” for electronically altered solo cello--the resourceful and sensitive Matt Cooker--combines invention and linearity in an attractive, eclectic idiom more jazz-connected than jazz-derived.

The most accomplished may be Brockman, whose virtuosic, complex piano-piece, “Character Sketches,” is much more fascinating than its title. As played effortlessly by Bryan Pezzone, the 13-minute work probes one composer’s memory of music by Debussy, Wagner and Mussorgsky. The result resembles an aural Rorschach test, with side trips.

Guardino’s provocative Three Caprices were so smoothly and convincingly performed by violinist Mitchell Newman and the composer at the piano that one might overlook the depth below the slickness. The same kind of handsome exterior could mask the genuine substance one believes lies beneath Hamilton’s Four Pieces, here neatly delivered by bass clarinetist Marty Walker and pianist Rein Rannap.

Two promising vocal works completed the program. Gonzalez’s brief “Ave Verum Corpus” employed advantageously the talents of an octet of Occidental College alumni. Hodler-Hamilton’s “Trois Chansons,” sung effectively by Katherine Peters (assisted by Cooker and Rannap), displayed sensitive word-setting but unnecessarily rangey vocal writing.

Scott Dunn was the able protagonist in a revival of Rosenman’s difficult, masterful “Theme and Elaborations” of 1951, a most engaging and brainy piano-piece deserving of wider hearings. Opening the program, cellist Cooker, flutist Mary Palchak and pianist Daniel Shapiro coped easily with the accessible beauties of Joel Kabakov’s inviting “Museum Pieces.”