Music Reviews : Chamber Music Society Revisits Modernism

For an organization often known for its contemporary programming, the Southwest Chamber Music Society’s concert Thursday at Chapman University waxed nostalgic, relatively speaking. The musical era in question was the period between the World Wars, and the program proved to be a provocative history lesson.

The spotlight belonged to Leonard Stein, displaying easy facility and dynamic sensitivity as a pianist. The venerable musical figure spent years as head of the Schoenberg Institute and is an avid advocate of his mentor’s music.

Balance and diversity marked an evening in which the rustic witticisms of Hindemith and Milhaud perched between the atonal schemes of Schoenberg and Varese, and the post-Romantic swoon of Poulenc.

Literally, the concert’s centerpieces were Stein’s performances of Hindemith’s Suite for Piano 1922, Opus 22, and Schoenberg’s Suite for Piano, Opus 25, which framed the intermission.

The two suites embody separate but related 20th-Century musical impulses--to dismantle and reinvent conventions. Hindemith’s suite, written when he was 25, buzzes with irreverence and impetuousness, with fleeting moments of dark introspection.

Contrarily, Schoenberg’s potent suite has nothing to do with clever genre-bashing. A seminal 12-tone work, it features an arid harmonic palette mated to traditional ideas of rhythm and dynamic contour.

The concert opened with Dorothy Stone’s vivid reading of Varese’s “Density 21.5” for solo flute, which explores the muscular alter ego of the often soft-pedaled instrument.

A token conservative piece, Poulenc’s Sonata for flute and piano, seemed out of place except as an illustration of the musical values the other composers represented here were fleeing from.

Milhaud’s Sonatine for flute and piano comes off as pleasant, sardonic impressionism, full of left turns and stowaway dissonant notes.

Milhaud’s endearing 1919 lark, “Le Boeuf sur le Toit,” for piano, four hands, kept the four hands--those of the flamboyant Vicki Ray and Susan Svrcek--quite busy, working with and against each other, sabotaging each other’s tonalities.

Repeatedly, the piece returns to a boisterous theme, as a drunken reveler might bore fellow partygoers with repetitions of a stale joke. But therein lies its charm.