Music Review : American Program by Bach Camerata

Make no mistake: The urge to bask in the intimacy of chamber music will prevail, for musicians and listeners alike. Such a truism helps account for the ongoing success of the Bach Camerata, founded five years ago by the fine flutist, Adrian Spence.

Though based in Santa Barbara, Spence enlists polished musicians from down south, and, this spring, presented concerts in Santa Barbara, Ventura and Thousand Oaks. For the finale of its six-program spring season, at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza’s Forum Theater on Sunday, the Bach Camerata laid out a comfortable all-American concert, propped up on pillars of Samuel Barber and Aaron Copland.

Whatever its other charms, Barber’s String Quartet, Opus 11--assuredly played here by violinists Roger Wilkie and Raphael Rishik, violist Matthew Funes and cellist John Walz--will always be notable for the poignancy of its Adagio.

Gunther Schuller’s bite-sized 1945 Suite hints at the jazz-classical merger that the composer would later systematize under the “third stream” concept.

Thomas Pasatieri’s 20-year-old Sonata for Viola and Piano, premiered here with the composer at the piano, is a noble enough addition to the slim repertoire of the viola, generally, and a vehicle for noted violist Don McInnes, specifically. Fervent post-romantic maneuverings, with generous interplay between the players, find them tracing a jagged arc of unspecified drama. Unsettled harmonic shifts and polytonal scheming make it less straightforward than we might think.

In what was, by this group’s standards, a grand finale, Copland’s pared-down “Appalachian Spring” suite for 13 players closed the concert, and the season. Without a conductor, the group carved out an expressive, cohesive path to its eerily placid finale, one of the great sighs of contentment in American musical history.