MUSIC REVIEW : Serkin Joins Guarneri for Henze Premiere

The delicate ears of the music world--at least the part of the world that values the gentle art of chamber music--were turned to Royce Hall, UCLA, on Tuesday night.

If some of those ears had to sustain the rigors of a little unaccustomed stretching, the exercise was both stimulating and healthy. And in return for enduring 20 minutes of astringent modernism (everything is relative), the audience was rewarded with a generous portion of cozy romanticism.

After the storm comes sunshine. After Hans Werner Henze comes Dvorak. Relief at last.

This was no ordinary large-scale concert of small-scale music. This was a prestigious program by the Guarneri String Quartet. Peter Serkin, a decisively stellar pianist, served as selfless, sensitive collaborator (the word soloist is misleading in this context). Most important, perhaps, the Henze offering--the conservative quasi-avant-gardist’s first piano quintet--turned out to be a world premiere.

Written for Serkin and the Guarneri in 1990 and 1991, it was commissioned by a consortium that includes UC Berkeley, Chamber Music Chicago, Ohio State University, the Bank of Boston and Lincoln Center--in addition to UCLA. Southern California enjoyed the honor of hearing it first.

Henze’s quintet doesn’t last long. Still, it packs a lot of abstract drama into 20 minutes.

The first movement is optimistically marked “Wild.” To at least one iconoclast it merely sounded nervous. The German composer, 62, has written a laconic program note that refers to “strong rhythmic elements . . . alarm signals . . . (and) fanfares.” To this listener, the opening suggested little more than a well-ordered essay in imitative noodling and contrapuntal doodling.

After this, Henze embarks on an extended adagio predicated on serene, shimmering textures eloquently punctuated by contemplative utterances from the keyboard. The lovely reverie moves quite organically to an unmarked finale in which hints of climactic passion are fused, elegantly, with mysterious sighs and soothing whispers.

The quintet may not represent Henze at his most profound. Despite the rather unsettling beginning, however, it may represent Henze at his most refined.

Serkin and the Quartet played it here with understated brio and perfectly integrated virtuosity. The players obviously found the inherent complexities and tensions engaging.

The audience seemed less impressed. The applause, though polite, was lukewarm and short-lived.

Dvorak’s Piano Quintet in A-major provided the wonted antidote to the essentially cerebral adventure: gut-thumping passion, arching melody, friendly folk-impulses, opulent dominant/tonic harmonies.

The mellow Guarneri, led by Arnold Steinhardt, played with exquisite ensemble values, shading the line with unanimous subtlety and applying rubato with daring generosity. Serkin thundered and muttered with poetic innocence. Discrepancies of intonation occasionally ruffled the fabric; in context, it hardly mattered.

The program opened with Haydn’s F-minor Quartet, Opus 20, No. 5, with John Dalley spelling Steinhardt at the first desk. Thorny under any condition, it was performed--for reasons unannounced--in place of Mozart’s K. 464. Pitch problems abounded here, the give and take of inner voices seemed oddly perfunctory, and textures tended toward the rough and unready.

All that ends well doesn’t always start well.