Music Reviews : Prism Quartet Plays at Police Building

Call it Chamber Music in Strange Places. Always in search of unusual concert venues, Chamber Music in Historic Sites held its final concert of the season in the Pasadena Police Building and Jail, completed in 1991.

Sunday afternoon’s guest was the Prism Quartet, a much-admired saxophone and MIDI ensemble, appearing on this occasion minus the electronic gadgetry. Good thing. The acoustics in the high-ceilinged, color-tiled, postmodern lobby where the concert took place proved problematical at best, resembling in their over-reverberant quality a, well, lobby in a large metropolitan police station.

Nevertheless, Prism, placed upon a landing a few steps above the main floor, tore into the music on its brief program with considerable enthusiasm as well as sensitivity, the results being muddled often but consistently vibrant and communicative.

The main event, no less, was a world premiere, the “Fantasy Quartet” by Michael Ruszczynski, partially commissioned by the Da Camera Society.

Starting from a point surprisingly reminiscent of the last scene of “Peter Grimes”--complete with distant foghorn and lonesome solo--the 24-minute work keeps to a melancholic mode, through high, sighing appoggiaturas, wailing and ethereal lyricism and urgent scat-like declamations. A brief, diabolical Scherzo sits in the center. With its strong tonal pull and emotional seriousness, it’s an accessible yet solemn neo-Romantic work.

Prism--saxophonists Reginald Borik (soprano), Michael Whitcombe (alto), Matthew Levy (tenor), Timothy Miller (baritone)--played it (and all) with apparent care for contrasts and colors, and with technical and theatrical flair.

The concert opened with Levy’s own “Mr. Bobs and Lori Ann,” a salute to ‘50s rockabilly that goes wonderfully awry into minimalism and cacophony; and concluded with Russell Peck’s “Drastic Measures,” which eases in and out of nightclub jazz, dissonant modernism, minimalism, up-tempo blues, ragtime . . . crossover heaven with teeth.