MUSIC REVIEW : Reassuring Familiarity by SONOR

“Easy listening” is an inconceivable characterization for thenew music performed by SONOR, UC San Diego’s contemporary music ensemble.

But at SONOR’s concert Wednesday night at Mandeville Auditorium, the 200 or so in attendance had it easy. No scratchy, skin-crawling disparities. No chaotic slamming. Though the works performed were incongruent in style, they were uncomplicated and reassuringly familiar overall. They lacked vexing challenges sought by those who prefer tough music or spiky aural thrills.

Instead, the compositions were thoughtful, even poetic, and were given authoritative performances by the 2 dozen musicians--USCD music faculty, graduate students and guest musicians--under the direction of John Fonville, SONOR director since 1988.

The featured composers range in age from late 20s to mid-70s. Surprisingly, and indicative of an even hand in programming, none of the pieces stood out.

David Lang’s music in “Dance/Drop” (1988-89) is punched with sound, like gunshots, with a variety of hard drum and bell sounds handily executed by Steven Schick. The minimalistic, three-part work for bassoon, saxophone, piano, synthesizer and percussion opened the concert.

Intended to follow was “Amichai Songs” (1984) by female composer Shulamit Ran, this year’s Pulitzer Prize-winner for music. Mezzo-soprano Carol Plantamura could not sing (laryngitis) and, disappointingly, the work was dropped.

Aleck Karis performed the substitution, Martin Boykan’s 1989 “Fantasy-Sonata” for solo piano, a dissonant three-movement beauty, with restrained ornamentation in an “old-fashioned” compositional form.

In “Music for Trumpet, Strings and Tympani,” composer and UCSD professor emeritus Robert Erickson also seemed to glance over his shoulder at the musical past, into a vapid Copland-esque soundscape. This short work, the esteemed Erickson’s latest, was written in 1990 for UCSD music professor Edwin Harkins. Harkins’ crisp trumpet playing was accompanied by appealingly simple, almost threadbare textures.

Twenty minutes of Eric Lyon’s mildly raucous “Splatter” (1989) gave the concert its humor. A chamber orchestra of winds, brass, piano, harpsichord, celesta and percussion and a few strings engaged in furious drips of this and that, highlighted by Heather Buchman’s chuffing trombone “talk.”

Afterward, two works from the 1960s brooded anticlimactically to close the concert. “Monologo” by Mario Lavista included text from Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman,” sung in Spanish by baritone Philip Larson. The sounds were neatly balanced among flute, contrabass and xylophone in the brief, grimly haunting piece.

Ralph Shapey’s “De Profundis,” recalling Stravinsky’s dramatic turns, featured a growling and glissandi-laced solo for contrabass, given a rugged rendering by Bertram Turetsky.