Goehr’s ‘Five’ Merits a Big High Five

New compositions are not always born in as supportive a context as Alexander Goehr’s “Five Objects Darkly” was Thursday evening at the Museum of Tolerance. The Southwest Chamber Music Society gave the piece its first performance as the most abstract component of an emotionally urgent program, where passion and irony jostled over shifting borders between atonality, tonality and modality.

Five movements for five instruments, based on five recompositions of a Mussorgsky snippet, “Five Objects Darkly” is a big-boned work from one of British music’s tribal elders. Although the first movement is titled “Ennui,” after the Mussorgsky song from which Goehr extracted thematic material, it would have benefited from less ploddingly cautious playing than that of violinist Rachel Vetter Huang, violist Jan Karlin, hornist Jeff von der Schmidt, bass clarinetist Martin Walker and pianist Gayle Blankenburg. The ensuing maze of virtuosic duets struck sparks in the musicians, however, and from there on the quintet flared magically.

The elegant, richly textured Schubertian dance finale of “Five Objects Darkly” resonated strongly with the faux-Viennese dance ending Schoenberg’s “Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte” in the second half of the concert. Von der Schmidt led a robust performance of the Ode featuring the highly energized reading of baritone Michael Ingham.

Modal and neo-modal Russian works opened each half of the program. Ingham sang Shostakovich’s “Four Poems of Captain Lebyadkin” in Russian with great gusto and breadth, similarly accompanied by Blankenburg. Intonational squalls buffeted Prokofiev’s “Overture on Hebrew Themes,” but rhythmic zest and the expressive phrasing of Walker carried it through successfully.

* The program will be repeated tonight at 8, Pasadena Presbyterian Church, 585 Colorado Blvd. $10-$20. (800) 726-7147.