MUSIC REVIEW : Southwest Chamber Group Offers New Babbitt Works

Just before the Southwest Chamber Music Society’s concert Friday at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, musicians Stephen Mosko, Leonard Stein and Mel Powell told the audience that what we were about to hear was great music indeed, and its composer, Milton Babbitt, one of the two or three greatest composers in America.

What’s more, the trio went on to demonize listeners and critics who take a disliking to Babbitt’s difficult music. Thus, it wasn’t exactly a dispassionate atmosphere in which to assess the five brief, newish Babbitt works for solo instruments presented here, three in West Coast premieres.

One certainly wondered what some performers thought of these works, hornist Jeff von der Schmidt among them, who huffed and puffed and sweated through the 14-minute “Around the Horn” (1993).

The piece doesn’t seem to be written for the instrument so much as against it, or in total disregard for it, with wide sudden leaps to extremes of range and dynamic its modus operandi. The two most effective works were those in which note production posed no problem, the 1987 “Homily” for snare drum and the 1988 “Beaten Paths” for marimba, both sensitively executed by Erik Forrester. The piece’s carefully etched phrases bounded compellingly through the reverberant gallery. “Beaten Paths” emerged lacy, ethereal, gently swirling and almost wholly pleasant.

Violist Jan Karlin gamely dispatched the very thorny “Play It Again, Sam” (1989) and flutist Dorothy Stone made an elegant case for “None but the Lonely Flute” (1991). It was all over quickly and almost painlessly.