MUSIC REVIEW : Southwest Chamber Society Offers Up Gems

The always adventurous Southwest Chamber Music Society opened its seventh season Saturday night in Pasadena with an agenda including a West Coast premiere--by British composer Anthony Payne--as well as two other chamber-music rarities.

Insightful, searching programming--with large dollops of contemporary music--seems to be this ensemble’s raison d’etre , and Saturday’s offering proved a typically treasure-filled evening.

The 57-year-old Payne’s 1986 “The Song Streams in the Firmament,” for clarinet, string quartet and double bass, sounded much like its title might suggest: an extended, rhapsodic clarinet melisma floating in the starry/churning heavens provided by the strings. The clarinet solo is busy, linear and improvisatory in nature, a sometimes frantic, sometimes peaceful song-before-death.

The highly active string accompaniment serves as troubled backdrop, glittering night sky and memory goader to the clarinet/ protagonist--it sounded as if the strings needled the clarinet to despair.

Michael Grego was the virtuosic clarinetist in the 14-minute work, in an ably executed and engaging reading.

The over-resonant Pasadena Presbyterian Church turned out not to be the ideal venue for the more modernistic offerings. The opening work on the concert, Prokofiev’s Quintet, Opus 39, for winds and strings, suffered most from bleeding colors and blurred lines.

The performers well captured the work’s metrical intricacies, caustic charm and gawky menace, however.

Dvorak’s String Quintet, Opus 77--in the reported Southland premiere of the work with the oft-deleted Notturno intact--closed the concert (which was scheduled to be repeated Sunday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center) in a sometimes untidy but mostly resplendent and incisive performance.