Music and Dance Reviews : Amsterdam Schoenberg Ensemble at El Camino

Music of the Second Viennese School usually gets played by mainstream orchestras in bits and pieces just every once in a while.

But when the 18-year-old Amsterdam Schoenberg Ensemble played at El Camino College Sunday, a small audience heard something rare for a standard concert series: specialists who not only devote themselves to works that came during and after the 12-tone revolution, but who also play reduced versions of same.

Seminal pieces one has known only in their full orchestral trappings sound very different in arrangements for small ensemble. And yet Schoenberg himself sponsored such reductions, so they come with every pedigree.

They also offer a new kind of ear-stretching.

Debussy’s “Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune,” for instance, which got things off to a whole-tone start, bore such exposed lines in this stripped-down version that it sounded skeletal rather than sensual.

But the Netherlanders, 11 strong here and led by founder Reinbert de Leeuw, made their virtuosic case with the subtlety of a down-volume phone conversation in which the speakers attend to every vocal nuance. Their achievement, in matters of balance and clarity, was sterling.

The same went for Webern’s Passacaglia, with its feverish outpourings of late Romanticism. De Leeuw and his charges did not mute the passion; they simply honed in on the exquisite slivers of sound to which those passions transmute.

It was Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces, however, that provided the ensemble’s best showcase. Whether acerbic or melancholy, dense with passagework or strung out along the slenderest lines, this work had the Netherlanders delivering gorgeous calibrations with pinpoint sharpness.

With so cultivated an undertaking one expected the printed program to include texts for the two song cycles--in vain.

But soprano Rosemary Hardy, who did the honors in Berg’s “Altenberg Lieder,” managed to suggest the irony-cum-sentimentality of these short, stunning incantations.

She also mastered the wide intervals, the whispers and trills with maximum expressivity.

After intermission Hardy and cohorts turned to Zemlinsky’s “Maeterlinck Gesange,” vaguely folksy, cabaretlike songs with a serious cast. These and Busoni’s “Berceuse elegiaque,” delicately minimal but lacking presence, did not compare with the program’s first half.