Music Reviews : Schickele, Brahms Paired at Gindi

Peter Schickele--the man who gave us P.D.Q. Bach--and Brahms proved not at all incompatible program-mates at Monday’s concert in Gindi Auditorium by members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Chamber Music Society.

Played to a large, appreciative audience, the program offered Schickele’s Second Quartet, written in 1987 in memory of his brother-in-law, a dissident Soviet writer described by the composer as having “a tragic quality but also an almost wicked sense of humor.” Both elements are discernible in a patchy score shot through with engaging ideas.

Schickele’s most obvious, and clever, P.D.Q.-like joke is the second-movement quotation from Haydn’s “Lark” Quartet: the blithe first violin theme that provides the piece’s nickname, but played on the viola in the midst of some ferocious ensemble sawing.

There is humor not only in the theme’s unexpected arrival but in the melancholy cast provided by its transference to the lower instrument, particularly as delivered on this occasion--deadpan and with big, plangent tone--by Evan Wilson.

Otherwise, Schickele’s quartet offers lots of muted harmonics, more minimalist noodling than necessary, and some thumping ostinatos that smack of filler.

But the finale, “Elegy,” is splendidly fulfilled. Here, the composer suggests the bleak stasis found in Shostakovich’s death-obsessed last quartets. But Schickele’s lyric impulse, in the form of a rapturous cello solo, adds a welcome, touching element of light and hope.

The commanding performers were violinists Barry Socher and Mitchell Newman, violist Wilson and cellist Gloria Lum.

Brahms’ Piano Quintet benefited from the presence of a lush-toned, passionate string ensemble--violinists Alexander Treger and Mark Kashper, violist Wilson and cellist Barry Gold--joining pianist Elizo Virzaladze, the previous weekend’s soloist with the Philharmonic.

Virzaladze proved the sort of attentive virtuoso who readily makes the transition to chamber music, capable both of leading and following, supplying waves of powerful, well-modulated tone and subtleties of dynamics and rhythm as the situation demands.

The program opened with an agile but needlessly hectic account of Vivaldi’s Sonata in A minor, RV 86, by violinist Dale Breidenthal, bassoonist David Breidenthal and harpsichordist George Calusdian.