MUSIC REVIEW : Southwest Chamber Warms 20th Century

Lest we forget, composer William Kraft was for a quarter-century a percussionist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In his compositional capacity, Kraft has long been kind toward the poor percussionist, who is too often relegated to a background position--literally and functionally--in the musical hierarchy.

Not surprisingly, percussionist Erik Forrester was a key protagonist in Music for String Quartet and Percussion, given a vibrant, sharply rendered world premiere by the Southwest Chamber Music Society in Pasadena Presbyterian Church on Saturday.

Rather than assume a coloristic role, Forrester engaged in an excited, egalitarian dialogue. Strings and percussion crossed each other’s paths and found common ground of sound production, between techniques of bowed and brushed percussion and percussive pizzicato from the strings.

Most important, Kraft again exercised his uncanny ability to make accessible and immediate music out of an essentially atonal palette.

Kraft’s centerpiece work was framed by early pieces by famous immigrants to the Southland. Stravinsky’s startlingly contemporary-sounding Three Pieces for String Quartet was written in 1914, a year after “Le Sacre du Printemps.” It has brevity and a bracing expressionistic intrigue on its side.

Ernst Krenek’s String Quartet No. 5 (1930) is a more sprawling affair, filling the concert’s second half with neo-Romantic ramblings whose parts are greater than the whole.

Performed boldly by the SCMS’ quartet--violinists Peter Marsh and Annie Chalex, violist Jan Karlin and cellist Roger Lebow--the concert proved another fulfilling venture into that sometimes lost musical epoch, the 20th Century.