Music Reviews : World Premiere for ‘Atlantic Serenade’

Falling between acknowledged masterpieces by Haydn and Brahms, Martin Amlin’s brand-new “Atlantic Serenade,” heard in its world premiere Sunday, held its own more than decently.

The quartet for flute, clarinet, cello and piano, commissioned by the Pacific Serenades series--making Amlin’s title a sideways pun, or at least bicoastal one--follows a French sensibility, achieves handsome and Ravelian textures, and offers at least as much emotional nourishment as one can demand of any new work these days.

Its composer, who played the piano in this performance in downtown Los Angeles, seems a skilled writer with plenty of ideas, and enough knowledge of instruments to create idiomatic parts for them.

His new piece, played here with Mark Carlson (director of the series), Gary Gray and David Speltz as his colleagues, promises more delights from the 39-year-old professor at Boston University: not invariably tonal, often aqueous sounds which follow their own mood-scenario and hold the listener through their unpredictability. At this premiere, the complexity of the writing in the quartet seemed to demand a conductor; the demand was met efficiently by young Jonathan Stockhammer.

In the comfortable, if ill-lit, Heinsbergen Room--not the originally announced Tiffany Room--at the Biltmore Hotel, the change of locale did not seem to hurt the performance of the work, though the change of piano might have made a difference to Raul Herrera, who was at the keyboard for the surrounding pieces, Haydn’s Trio in G, Hob. XV:15, and Brahms’ Opus 114.

In both, Herrera seemed more timid than assertive, and not always articulate in the natural rhetoric of these composers. With flutist Carlson in Haydn, clarinetist Gray in Brahms, and cellist Speltz in both, these readings, though pleasing and uneventful, emerged less than fully authoritative.

After intermission, Carlson, the series’ founder and artistic director, asked the large audience to refrain from rattling their coffee cups during the playing. Alas, it was too late; such rattling had already taken place. Given a modicum of other civilized circumstances, nothing distracts music-lovers more gratingly than the sound of dishes.