Southwest Chamber Society Shows Style in Varied Recital

As program concepts go, “new music from California” is not a tie that binds very tightly. The second of the Southwest Chamber Music Society’s Soliloquy Recitals, Sunday afternoon at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, did prove stylistically diverse, though hardly suggestive of any regional identity.

Joan Huang has a distinctive flair for musical imagery and it was much evident in her “Settings for Twelve Chinese Symbols.” In this first performance at least--played by violist Jan Karlin, hornist Jeff von der Schmidt and pianist Gayle Blankenburg--the austerely sketched symbols worked more effectively than the busier constructions, but these miniatures hold both individual beauties and cumulative strength.

The other premiere, Richard Derby’s Duo for Horn and Piano, also made its best points with its fewest notes, in a central adagio of pointed, thoughtful but deeply felt plaint. The weighty, well-wrought work opens, however, with a heroic but conventional exercise in post-serial interval tracking and ends with a vivace of intermittent motor energies. Von der Schmidt played with noble brilliance, though missing connection with Blankenburg’s incisive work in the climax of the finale.

Ironically, the program found its oldest and youngest contributors, 52-year-old Michael Pawlicki and 26-year-old Scott Knell, mining similar veins of neo-romanticism. Knell’s forthright Piano Sonata No. 1 conjures memories of many other composers, from Rachmaninoff to George Crumb--which is also to say that it is a gratefully idiomatic piece for a pianist with both power and a palette, requirements Blankenburg met easily.

The program began in a state of lyric grace with Pawlicki’s Rhapsody for Viola and Piano, a work that wears its surface sentiments candidly but is not above slyly goosing its tonal foundation. Karlin projected it with caressive elan, deftly partnered by Blankenburg.