Music Review : Baby-Inspired Premiere Concludes Series

The season finale of the chamber-music series Pacific Serenades featured a couple of ex-Californians, composer Larry Lipkis and violist Cynthia Phelps, in apparently happy, if brief, homecomings.

Given the circumstance, Sunday afternoon in the Emerald Room of the Biltmore Hotel, it seemed appropriate that Lipkis, now a professor and composer-in-residence at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pa., should celebrate some of the pleasures of home life in his new work, “Dancing in Her Sleep,” commissioned for Pacific Serenades and given its world premiere on this occasion.

Ostensibly a piano quintet, but actually a miniconcerto or suite written with Phelps, principal violist of the New York Philharmonic, in mind, “Dancing” describes in six brief movements the nighttime twitterings and gyrations of the composer’s sleeping baby daughter.

The work makes its points gently and amusingly. Even when, as in the Fantasy-Caprice and Tarantella movements, the musical rhetoric gets more jagged and heated (though still accessible), the viola’s lyrical flights--mellow, nocturnal, Bartokian--are never far away. Phelps delivered the work, fittingly, with warm elegance and effortless virtuosity.

The same quintet--violins Margaret Batjer and Connie Kupka, cellist David Speltz, pianist Ayke Argus and Phelps--got together after intermission for a poised yet dramatic reading of Brahms’ Piano Quintet, Opus 34. Tautly executed and disciplined, the performance benefited from some especially subtle and sensitive playing by Argus and an intensity level that rose as the work proceeded.

Batjer and Phelps teamed to open the concert with Mozart’s outwardly simple, inwardly sophisticated Duo, K. 423, in a reading of equal parts finesse and boldness.