MUSIC REVIEWS : Trio of Americas Offers Premieres

In Dabney Lounge at Caltech, Sunday afternoon, Trio of the Americas--pianist Zita Carno, clarinetist William Powell and cellist Janice Foy--assisted by percussionist David Johnson, performed an unusual, and unusually satisfying program.

The highlight was the “likely” (according to Boosey & Hawkes, the publisher) West Coast premiere of Alberta Ginastera’s Cello Sonata, Opus 49, written in 1979 for the composer’s wife, Aurora Natola-Ginastera, and reserved initially for her exclusive use; it is scheduled for publication later this year.

Lasting nearly 20 minutes and incorporating music from Ginastera’s Cello Concerto No. 2, the four-movement work encompasses an extraordinary range of technical demands and musical effects from driving, multiple-octave, double-stop glissandi and trills to extravagantly lyrical outbursts and almost painfully beautiful night-music episodes.

Although it is a work that would richly repay performance by the world’s leading cellists, the hard-working Foy brought to it such energy and enthusiasm, and Carno backed her with such overwhelmingly colorful sound, that any technical shortcomings were lost in the shuffle.

The world premiere of 38-year-old John Naples’ 15-minute “Phantasmagoria,” for the Trio plus drummer Johnson, proved it to be a conservatively abstract piece in which the composer’s vivid, genuinely theatrical invention easily held the attention.

The program opened with Jane Brockman’s highly effective, 15-minute “Tenacious Turns” for Powell, accompanied by an array of synthesized echoes and “orchestral” backing, in which the graceful implications of Baroque ornamentation are explored within a darkly Romantic harmonic framework.

The remainder of the afternoon included two works by Carno, her clever and amusing “Extrapolations I” for clarinet and piano, and the world premiere of a gently meandering “Intermezzo” for the attractive combination of clarinet and cello.

The only dead wood on the program: Robert Muczynski’s mostly academic “Fantasy” Trio, Opus 26, in which Foy lagged frustratingly behind colleagues Carno and Powell in intonation and sound production.