MUSIC AND DANCE REVIEW : Southwest, Nahualli Volley at Luckman Theatre

The Nahualli Ensemble and the Southwest Chamber Music Society played musical, cross-cultural tennis Saturday night in Luckman Theatre at Cal State Los Angeles.

The results were engaging but hardly illuminating. When it comes right down to it, world music , probably the best term for what the Nahualli plays, just doesn’t have that much in common with Bartok. The two ensembles, seated stage right and left, never performed simultaneously and ended up merely as aural palate-cleansers for each other.

The Nahualli--led by Martin Espino, with Brad Dutz and Cassio Duarte--is a high-concept group that performs on “pre-Hispanic and traditional flutes and percussion.” In practice, this means that these musicians play just about anything you can hit, rattle, scratch or blow from Africa, India, Central and South America.

A typical piece, such as the perfectly titled “Aztec-Angola Raga,” is a hypnotic rhythmic vamp over which various flutes, whistles and shells are played in improvisatory rhapsody. The lively amplification is crucial to Nahualli’s music: The throbbing percussion, the huff and puff of the winds, the tinkling of seashells emerge in lush detail. The players even use their breathing as sounds.

They traded numbers with the Southwest musicians--violinists Peter Marsh and Susan Jensen, violist Jan Karlin and cellist Richard Naill--who offered Revueltas’ exuberantly knotty Fourth String Quartet, Bartok’s Third Quartet and the Lento from Dvorak’s “American” Quartet in strongly considered and delivered readings. Now, someone should write a piece for both ensembles, tutti.