MUSIC REVIEWS : Northridge Concert Offers New Works

With the campus still looking much like a war zone, signs of life are creeping back at Cal State Northridge. On Saturday night, a good-sized audience turned up at the Little Theatre for the first concert there since the January 17 earthquake.

The music at hand, however, by faculty composers William Toutant and Daniel Kessner, did not speak about (or in the threatening tones of) earth-shattering events. The composers had more modest ends in mind and, throughout the evening, in three premieres and two older works, the music unwound agreeably, conversationally and with a spareness of rhetoric.

In Toutant’s “Gems,” the instruments--a piano and a battery of percussion (for two players)--dealt in shards of sound, short motifs and sustained glimmers resonating in the air like sparkling refractions from precious stones.

Similarly, Kessner’s “Shades of Pastel,” for alto flute and prepared guitar, concerned itself with visual phenomena as well, transforming single notes with microtonal and enharmonic manipulations, shifting their colors in a subdued dialogue conducted in Asian languages.

Built from a single opening scale, Toutant’s “Cells IIA,” for clarinet, cello and vibraphone alternating with marimba, went along as a civilized round-table discussion, the subject set but drifting, with monologues, dialogues, group chatting and everyone getting in their two-cents worth before finding agreement at the end.

Quick rhythmic tradeoffs between alto flute and marimba propelled Toutant’s brief “Bagatelle” forward like an Abbott & Costello routine--you never knew who would complete a sentence. Kessner’s “One Voice, Alone,” for woodwind quintet, presented a landscape of slow-moving acidic chords and brief solo flights escaping into the arid air. Except for a seemingly tentative Whole Bean Quintet in this last piece, the various performers dispatched their tasks admirably.