MUSIC REVIEW : A Gem Opens Chamber Music Season

At the top of the Sepulveda Pass in more ways than one Monday night, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Chamber Music Society opened another season of its popular series in Gindi Auditorium at the University of Judaism.

This was a terrific night of chamber music, a night that explored unusual instrumental combinations, that allowed 14 Philharmonic musicians a chance to shine and that wound up with a revelation.

Continuing the Philharmonic’s Hindemith retrospective, clarinetist Monica Kaenzig and a string quartet led by Barry Socher offered an exhilarating performance of the composer’s neglected Clarinet Quintet of 1923.

Performing the five-movement work of palindromic design, the quintet doesn’t subsist in that sometimes humdrum world of Hindemithian counterpoint, taking off instead into Mahlerian flights of grotesquerie, inhabiting stark Shostakovichian landscape and grinding aggressively with Bartokian menace.

There is real drama in it, and breeziness to balance the dissonant haze, color to counteract the fugal gloom. A gem.

Too bad many in the wary crowd missed it. Alarmed by Hindemith’s difficult trio, Opus 47, heard earlier, they walked before it started. Hornist Jerry Folsom, violist John Hayhurst and pianist Zita Carno had at any rate communicated the trio’s angular themes, polyphonic games and motor rhythms with aplomb.

On his own, Hayhurst, despite a couple of mental lapses, gave a wonderfully amiable, perceptive reading of the Suite No. 1 by Bach. Bing Wang headed a luxurious, urgent account of Dvorak’s Terzetto. And David Weiss starred in Mozart’s Oboe Quartet, tiptoeing through its ditties with pointed ease.