Music : In Tune With Past Moderns

At one time, SONOR, UC San Diego’s contemporary music ensemble, performed nothing but new music: just-completed pieces whose parts had been hastily copied out the day of the performance or tapes whose beeps and crackles had been synthesized only the night before. Compared to this standard, Saturday evening’s SONOR concert at Mandeville Auditorium dipped back into the cobwebbed vaults of early music.

Early music from the SONOR world view is not Machaut or Monteverdi, of course, but Charles Ives’ “Largo”(1902) and Arnold Schoenberg’s “Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte”(1942). Vintage works from UCSD composers--Robert Erickson’s trumpet solo “Kryl” (1977) and Brian Ferneyhough’s “Prometheus” wind sextet (1967)--added even more perspective to the two new compositions programmed, but all of this historical reference took away some of the customary expectation of a SONOR event.

Frank Cox’s “viz.”, the evening’s sole premiere, reflected the best SONOR traditions: an adventurous, engaging and complex work that begged for a second hearing from the opening notes. It was difficult to track the work’s inner architecture the first time out, but Cox created an unmistakable sense of progression without resorting to tonality. A virtual gamelan of percussion effects framed sensuous textures sculpted from whirring wind and string motifs. Cox’s indulgent instrumentation required nearly 20 players, but the effect was mesmerizing.

“Archipel brise et retour” (1988) for string quintet by Frank Pecquet was another collage of flickering motifs based on small intervals. But the composer’s arid formal concepts and limited timbres combined to produce an overly static sound mass. Ferneyhough’s “Prometheus” struck the most chaste sonic pose, daring the listener to find so much as a hint of allure in its serial severity. This carefully controlled arch of post-Webern counterpoint, completed when Ferneyhough was still a student, displayed the composer’s trademark intensity, even without the crabbed arabesques of complexity that mark his mature scores.

Edwin Harkins first played Erickson’s “Kryl” almost 15 years ago, and it has become the trumpeter’s signature piece, much like Puccini’s “Nessun dorma” aria is to Luciano Pavarotti. Although the nonstop liquid melody of “Kryl” both celebrates and satirizes trumpet virtuosity, some of the extended instrumental techniques, especially singing through the instrument, sound self-conscious and increasingly dated.

Baritone Philip Larson made the best of intoning the lengthy Lord Byron poem Schoenberg superimposed over his prickly 12-tone piano quintet in “Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte,” a thinly veiled wartime barb at Hitler. Not as blatant as, say, Kurt Weill’s propaganda ballad of the same year, “Schickelgruber,” Schoenberg’s work strained credibility despite SONOR’s polished performance. Programming Ives’ short, nostalgic “Largo” before the Schoenberg bordered on the redundant, but any occasion to hear violinist Janos Negyesy spin out a gorgeous line is a listener’s moment of paradise.