Music Reviews : Trio Mexico Offers Chamber Music Set

Saturday night in Schoenberg Hall Auditorium at UCLA, the Mexican Chamber Music Series served up another rare helping of mostly Mexican fare, with Trio Mexico acting as the chefs. However, there wasn’t much to savor this time.

Actually, the ensemble--Jorge Suarez, piano, Manuel Suarez, violin, and Ignacio Mariscal, cello--got off its best shot first with a brief yet bracing Trio by Daniel Catan. In eight compact minutes, Catan displays a strikingly original idiom, with tremolos and trills creating sustained tension that leave the listener with an appetite for more.

But then, we were stuck back in Manuel Ponce’s post-Brahmsian mode with his “Trio Romantico.” Loaded as this work is with generic, late-Romantic turbulence and sentimental contrasts, a blindfolded concert-goer would have trouble guessing the nationality of its composer.

While Armando Lavalle’s Trio No. 2 at least offered some Latino flavor, its four short movements did little more than state not-too-memorable big tunes over minimal accompaniments. The American entry on the program was UCLA faculty member Paul Reale’s wandering Trio No. 2 (subtitled “Drowsey Maggie”), which finally found its bearings in its fifth movement with some exuberant, droll elaborations on a fiddle tune.

On the whole, Trio Mexico sounded like a well-balanced, closely knit unit. Yet Manuel Suarez and Mariscal experienced some annoying trouble in the intonation department during the Ponce and Reale pieces, harming both causes.