Music Reviews : Krenek Memorial at Chapman

The Southwest Chamber Music Society has long championed the works of Ernst Krenek, who died in December at age 91. The society actually includes in its list of Krenek credits such a milestone as the U.S. premiere of the Sonata for Violin, Opus 33, some 66 years after its composition.

Thursday’s memorial concert at Chapman University--which was scheduled to be repeated in Pasadena on Friday--featured two of Krenek’s late compositions, both from 1988, both wonderfully fluid, dramatic and, despite the atonal idiom, accessible.

“Dyophonie,” heard here in its U.S. premiere, is a seven-minute, freewheeling dialogue for two cellos. Punctuated by sudden outbursts of declamation, loud pizzicati and brief moments of silence, the musical discourse moves easily and clearly through imitative questions and answers, the moods of initial assertions echoed and expanded upon by replies, as the music mounts to high-range, lyrical outpourings.

The Seventh Piano Sonata--previously given its U.S. premiere by Southwest and the same pianist as on this occasion, Gloria Cheng--can also be heard as conversation, this one between right hand and left hand, between high and low, brightness and shadow, frenetic figurations and pounding repeated tones.

Simplicity of utterance with fluent atonality--such elements have rarely been combined to such telling effect. Cellists Roger Lebow( and Paul Kellett brought impressive polish and unforced rhetoric to “Dyophonie”; Cheng proved similarly impeccable in technique and dramatic pacing.

Framing the Krenek pieces were septets by Stravinsky and Beethoven. Sabotaged by some noisy audience members and the hall’s reverberant acoustic, Stravinsky’s 1953 Septet and its busy counterpoint of jagged and fragmented motives emerged murkily, like a Picasso in bad light.

Beethoven’s Opus 20, with its simpler textures, fared better, with violinist Sheryl Staples and clarinetist David Howard shining in the featured roles.