DANCE AND MUSIC REVIEWS : Southwest Chamber in Intriguing Show

Chamber music took a beating in Pasadena, Saturday night, when an hourslong freeway traffic jam having to do with a rock concert at the Rose Bowl made concertgoers late in arriving at their destinations.

At the April event by the Southwest Chamber Music Society, this time devoted to 20th-Century music for woodwinds, the scheduled pre-concert speaker, composer Mel Powell, never spoke; he arrived at Pasadena Presbyterian Church an hour late, just in time to hear the first half of the concert.

At Ambassador Auditorium, the Times’ representative never got there at all; as a result, no review of the Waverly Consort’s latest Ambassador concert is possible.

For the small but deeply attentive audience gathered in the airy sanctuary at Pasadena Pres (as the cognoscenti call it), the Southwest Wind Quintet introduced recent music written by Powell and Milton Babbitt, revived worthy and attractive pieces by Ruth Crawford-Seeger and Villa-Lobos and concluded, scrappily, with a genuine masterpiece, Janacek’s “Mladi,” wherein they were joined by bass-clarinetist David Sherr.

Powell’s Wind Quintet proved the high point of this intriguing program. In a bracing 10 minutes, it offers consistent richness, instrumental transparency, bright harmonies--whatever the composer’s self-named “pitch-tableau procedures” are, he should share their secrets with the dullards of younger generations--and glimpses into a brilliant aural imagination.

Not surprisingly, then, the newish piece sounds unique; as played by the Southwest five--flutist Dorothy Stone, oboist Stuart Horn, clarinetist Michael Grego, hornist Jeff von der Schmidt and bassoonist Leslie Lashinsky--it certainly proved irresistible.

Crawford-Seeger’s melancholy but provocative Suite (1952) for wind quintet opened the program; Janacek’s emotionally resonant “Mladi” closed it. In between, there were pleasures aplenty in Stone and Lashinsky’s virtuosic and effortless playing of Villa-Lobos’ “Bachianas Brasileiras,” No. 6, and in Stone’s commanding performance of a piece written for her, Babbitt’s “None but the Lonely Flute” (1991).