Music : Southwest Gives ‘Ariel’ U.S. Bow in Enterprising Group Effort

In its steady growth, the Southwest Chamber Music Society has now reached the stage where celebrated guest artists grace its roster. That is no negative reflection on Southwest’s admirable resident artists, but rather another indication of their high accomplishment.

For the society’s November concerts, Friday at Chapman University in Orange and Saturday at Pasadena Presbyterian Church, such guests included British composer Alexander Goehr--whose 50-minute cantata “Sing, Ariel,” was being given its United States premiere performances--American soprano Lucy Shelton and conductor Oliver Knussen.

The occasion, Friday night in Orange, seemed remarkable not because the performers are well-known but because the new work sounded important: a serious composer’s reconsideration of art and life at mid-career; Goehr was 57 at the time of the first performances, three years ago.

“Sing, Ariel” is a tight-knit song-cycle dominated by one soprano, assisted by two others and with challenging instrumental parts for violin, viola, trumpet, bass clarinet/saxophone, piano and string bass.

With poetry by 15 different writers, librettist Frank Kermode has fashioned a spiritual journey described by Goehr as a progression from a “sort of Paradise in which everything is lovely . . . (through) solitude, separation, unhappiness and loneliness. . . .”

It is harrowing, beauteous, emotionally panoramic and often touching. It is also largely tonal, though hardly simplistically so. Goehr, who turned 60 in August, does not in this work subscribe to the “integral serialism” of earlier decades. He writes melodically and with an unfaltering knowledge of the voice, as well of instruments.

His protagonist at this U.S. premiere--as she was at the world premiere at Aldeburgh, in 1989--was Shelton, whose voice retains its purity and whose artistry seems to have become ever more pungent and probing since she last visited here.

Shelton delivered these many words in disparate styles with clarity and nuance, shading their meanings with tone, emphasizing their relationships with dynamics.

Her colleagues--violinist Sheryl Staples, violist Jan Karlin, bassist Richard Wilson, trumpeter Tony Ellis, clarinetist/sax player David Sherr, pianist Vicki Ray and sopranos Anne Marie Ketchum and Kerry Walsh--shared the soloist’s highlighting of details and overall sense of sweep, all conducted with surety by Knussen.

(Incidentally, Knussen will also conduct the U.S. premiere of another Goehr work, the Piano Concerto, at Los Angeles Philharmonic concerts beginning Dec. 5.)

The short first half of the Southwest Society concert offered more music from England: four songs and elegies by Henry Purcell, as stylishly performed by countertenor Dana Marsh and lutenist James Tyler.