Hot Harpsichord Series Revives a Powell Sonata

Musicians who have something to prove make for engaging listening. Their concerts become arguments for the cause, whether it’s Berlioz, Byzantine chant or the sousaphone.

Patricia Mabee and Barbara Cadranel are two such musicians, out to show that their instrument, the harpsichord, is not the cool, antique medium we might think it is. Thus their Hot Harpsichord series at Westwood United Methodist Church, which Tuesday night offered a grab-bag program that ably revealed the instrument’s viability and versatility.

It included the West Coast premiere of Mel Powell’s Harpsichord Sonata from the early ‘50s, thought to be lost but found by Cadranel, a friend of Powell’s, in the composer’s Northridge home last summer. A rambling, episodic essay in four movements and 20 minutes, Powell’s Sonata, reportedly inspired by Scarlatti’s sonatas, sounds like a couple dozen of them diced, spliced and morphed. The music keeps taking wrong turns and ending up in outer Mongolia; it stops short, hiccups and restarts; it echoes Scarlatti then crushes him with dissonant landslides. Cadranel’s headlong performance left one wondering about some of its shapes, and where movements began and ended.

Cadranel and Mabee played seven Scarlatti sonatas as well, in contrasting interpretive styles--Cadranel tossing them off flamboyantly, Mabee in a more direct fashion.

With energetic bluegrass fiddler Richard Greene, Mabee romped through Steve Goldstein’s “Sonata in Bluegrass” and “Bass Going Crazy,” the latter a 12-bar boogie-woogie that particularly suited the harpsichord.

She produced a clear reading of Couperin’s smirking Rondeau, “Les Baricades Misterieuses,” which has some fun with beat displacement, and accompanied violinist Margaret Wooten and flutist Janice Tipton in Ibert’s 1946 “Deux Interludes”--pleasant but treacly stuff. The harpsichordists’ next concert is equally ambitious: It features Bach’s double, triple and quadruple concertos for their beloved instrument.

* The Hot Harpsichord series continues on April 1 at 8 p.m., Westwood United Methodist Church, 10497 Wilshire Blvd. $10-$15. (310) 641-2645.