Pianists Cheng, Ray Team Up for a Rarefied Harmonic Treat

In regional new music circles, it’s not uncommon to find Gloria Cheng or Vickie Ray holding forth behind a piano, doing their bit as 20th century musical advocates. Finding them sharing a stage, nodding cues and swapping insights across a pair of concert grands, as they did Monday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, proved a rarity worth savoring.

Theirs was a cohesive, solidly built program of three ambitious and influential works, each treated with loving care. A running theme of the evening had to do with pianos working in and out of accord, with altering definitions of time and harmony, as well as a shared spirit of intellectual and, in the case of Olivier Messiaen’s “Visions de l’Amen,” spiritual inquiry.

Hindsight reflects kindly on Steve Reich’s 1967 “Piano Phase,” a beguiling piece in which starkly simple materials yield mind-altering results. A mantra-like succession of notes, articulated with pristine crispness or in a sustain-pedaled swirl, shifts attention from minute details to holistic textures. Gyorgy Ligeti’s “Three Pieces for Two Pianos” may be considered a modern masterpiece. It gives the impression of rickety, process-minded musical machinery and a geyser of musical profundity, all at once.

Consuming the second half of the program, and testing these pianists’ mettle, Messiaen’s 1943 two-piano work ranges from sensual repose to thunderous processions of polychords. As with much of the composer’s music, this work manages to balance asceticism with an audacious, urbane wit that puts sheen and muscle into what is essentially religious music.

The paradox was one of the many juxtapositions that the pianists navigated with unflinching aplomb.