MUSIC REVIEW : A Solid Program by Da Capo Chamber Players

Most concerts by the ubiquitous mixed chamber ensembles that dominate new music series feature a string of works in the 10-minute to 15-minute range. Pieces such as Bruce Adolphe’s “Machaut Is My Beginning,” with which the Da Capo Chamber Players opened the latest Monday Evening Concert in Bing Theater at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

That witty and deceptively simple-sounding recomposition of Machaut’s canon “Ma fin est mon commencement” was written for the ensemble--flutist Patricia Spencer, clarinetist Laura Flax, pianist Sarah Rothenberg, violinist Eric Wyrick and cellist Andre Emelianoff--and the elegant performance revealed why the Da Capo Players are at the head of their class.

But on this symphonically scaled program, that was just the overture to a brace of large works, Nicholas Maw’s “Ghost Dances” and Messiaen’s “Quatuor pour la fin du temps.”

Maw may be best known locally by rumors--and Simon Rattle’s recording--of his gargantuan “Odyssey” for orchestra. The British composer, who attended the concert, has a reputation for massive structures and dense textures.

Though very substantial and complex, “Ghost Dances” (1988) is not monumental in spirit or forbidding in sound. Rather it is a genuinely atmospheric, highly allusive, tautly organized suite of dance references. Maw’s titles and tempo indications suggest a fashionably vampiric nightmare, but the music sounded warm and lyrical as often as cold and frenzied.

Maw also asks his musicians to play various folk instruments, mostly percussive. For the bulk of the piece those contributions seemed just so much gratuitous sonic graffiti, but the chill chimes of small cymbals and the gentle plunking of a kalimba became the essential components of a transfigured epilogue.

The composer entrusted his most expansive tunes to the cello, and Emelianoff delivered them with ardent grace. In more extrovert passages, balances tended to tip in favor of Rothenberg’s powerful pianism, but the slippery music remained convincingly cohesive.

Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” is, of course, a known quantity. The Da Capo way with it proved detailed and committed movement by movement, somewhat disconnected as a whole. Wyrick--the newest member of the ensemble--and Emelianoff played their hymns with an effectively broad range of dynamics and color, Flax made a rapt, enervated dream of her solo, and Rothenberg kept her incisive work in pointed context.