MUSIC REVIEWS : Krosnick, Kalish Bring Bacon’s ‘A Life’ to Bing

Joel Krosnick and Gilbert Kalish brought an imaginative program to their Los Angeles County Museum Bing Auditorium recital Wednesday night. Krosnick (the Juilliard Quartet cellist) and Kalish (director of chamber music for the Boston Symphony) surrounded contemporary works by Ernst Bacon and Olivier Messiaen with classics by Mendelssohn and Franck.

The evening’s star was “A Life” by the obscure Bacon, born in Chicago in 1898 and little more than a footnote in reference books (he founded the Carmel Bach Festival in 1935).

Written in two installments, following his son’s birth in 1939 and tragic death in 1972, and employing what Krosnick called a “very personal, very intimate musical language,” the five-movement suite kept the audience quietly engaged for more than 25 minutes. From the stage, Krosnick told how he had discovered the music in a New York library and how, upon contacting Bacon before his death in 1990, had been told of the pain it contained.

Throughout the first three movements, the cello’s mainly tonal rhapsodizing was accompanied by so many suspended, empty harmonic resolutions in the piano that it was like overhearing the innermost thoughts of a man to whom life meant a great deal. After the angry angularities of “Young Manhood,” the concluding “Departure” was an almost unbearably sad, slow sequence of sighs and consolations.

Despite Krosnick’s inability to coax color from his instrument (a problem that haunted him throughout the evening), the profundity of the performance made clear that “A Life” is a major addition to the cellist’s repertory.

Krosnick and Kalish brought similar emotional intensity to the meditative poignancy of “Louange a l’Eternite,” the fifth movement from Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time.”

The rest of the program, however, comprising Mendelssohn’s Opus 45 and Franck’s A-major sonatas, was less successful because of Krosnick’s recalcitrant cello (he had to restart the Mendelssohn after a tuning peg slipped) and seemingly related problems of intonation and agility.