MUSIC REVIEW : Flutist Wincenc’s Showcase: Picking Several Odd Pieces

Flutist Carol Wincenc picked some odd pieces to showcase herself when she teamed up with the Angeles Quartet--violinists Kathleen Lenski and Roger Wilkie, violist Brian Dembow and cellist Stephen Erdody--Tuesday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre. The program was jointly sponsored by the Laguna Chamber Music Society and the Orange County Philharmonic Society.

Franz Anton Hoffmeister’s Flute Quartet in C is a curio of an earlier day--an arrangement of Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 7 designed to further its progress among amateur music groups. (Hoffmeister was one of Mozart’s publishers.)

The result, however, was to turn a work of personal focus into modest drawing room music.

Wincenc had further adapted Hoffmeister’s transcription to eliminate some display passages he had cobbled onto Mozart, thereby minimizing her virtuoso opportunities. Still, the flutist played with steadiness, clarity and clean articulation. Lenski, Dembow and Erdody provided cushy support.

Max Reger’s relatively unfamiliar Serenade in G for Flute, Violin and Viola is a bracing and pungent work, but it is marred by episodic construction. It unfolds in short, fragmented sections, from a perky, scrappy opening, through an interrupted melodic middle movement to end with ambulatory excursions. Wincenc played brightly. Lenski and Dembow too often sounded tentative.

Elsewhere, the Angeles playing was characterized by clarity, balance and compact focus, but also by a seemingly deliberately narrow dynamic range and a reticence of individual expression.

A more positive way of putting it may be that the players concentrated on carefully listening to each other to achieve an edgeless meshing of parts and a continuity of sound. But all this took a toll on dramatic possibilities and projecting a sense of personal voices.

In Schubert’s “Quartettsatz,” the players favored a long-breathed, structural approach--matching, for instance, their opening finely built, nervous crescendo with an equally controlled diminuendo to close the exposition. Correspondingly, they made the lyric sections emerge from the tense beginning, rather than exploiting them as major emotional contrasts.

In Mendelssohn’s Opus 81, the four perhaps were most revelatory in suggesting muted sorrow in the theme-and-variations second movement. Indeed, this work prompted their most impassioned playing of the evening, and happily had them pushing at earlier, self-imposed boundaries.

For an encore, Wincenc joined the others in a transcription of Faure’s familiar Pavane.