Music Reviews : Austrian Miniatures by Strimple, Choral Society

Many timid programmers conveniently forget that Austrian music did not stop with Gustav Mahler. But not Nick Strimple, whose Choral Society of Southern California explored an amazingly eclectic panorama of mostly miniatures at the Beverly Hills Presbyterian Church Sunday night.

Chips off the workbenches of Schoenberg, Webern, Krenek and other 20th-Century figures would compete with Wolf, Bruckner, Mozart and Schubert for space. If anything, however, most (not all) of the pieces here tended to look backward in time.

Krenek, our man in Palm Springs, displayed two of his facets--the contemplative, neo-Renaissance one in “Psalmverse zur Kommunion” and his more familiar, severe, dissonant persona in “O Holy Ghost.” Webern’s early “Entflieht auf leichten Kahnen” uncharacteristically drifted around the chromatic scale, while Schoenberg could be heard reveling in the tonal counterpoint of “Three German Folksongs.”

Two of the most striking pieces came from less-heralded figures--Josef Friedrich Doppelbauer’s bright, open “Cantate Domino canticum novum” and Gerhard Track’s spectacularly spatial, nearly wailing “Ex Sion species.” There was even a fleeting world premiere, the strange, austere, tiny “Kyrie I (Durham Cathedral)” from Rene Staar.

Mozart’s “Quaerite primum regnum Dei,” one of those fabled stunt pieces that one never hears, turned out to be a soaring, extremely moving mini-masterpiece. The rarely performed, remarkably dramatic Schubert cantata, “Mirjams Siegesgesang,” stamped with the forceful imprint of Beethoven, closed the evening.

Throughout, the various configurations of the Choral Society acquitted themselves well, though the sopranos’ pitches sometimes wandered at the top of their range. In a solo spot, mezzo-soprano Jayne Campbell offered characterful if tremulous performances of three Wolf lieder.