New Work by Linn Opens Southwest Chamber Series

One expects engaging provocation, not merely pleasantries at a Southwest Chamber Music Society concert, but pleasantries occupied the organization’s 1996-97 mainstage series opening this week. The program of music by Dvorak, Robert Linn and Mozart was given Thursday at the Museum of Tolerance and will be repeated tonight in Pasadena.

Linn’s new five-movement work, called Divertimento, offers an agreeable, sometimes pungent 20th century style and cannily uses an octet of instruments--string quintet plus oboe and two horns--to produce an alternating vista of autumnal reflection and generalized jollity. It breaks no ground yet emerges as an extremely attractive work.

After a scrappy beginning, the Southwest players gave it a fair hearing, though a prodding conductor might have enlivened the performance.

Otherwise, the darkish but commodious, acoustically mixed auditorium of the museum hosted presentable but uninspired readings of Dvorak’s Notturno for strings and Mozart’s Divertimento in D, K. 251.

* The Southwest Chamber Music Society repeats this program tonight at 8 at Pasadena Presbyterian Church, 585 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (800) 726-7147. $10-$20.