Flirting With Rock and Chamber Classics

Intermarriage between rock and classical music has often been an idealistic but murky affair in which each party yearns to understand the other but ends up at a communications impasse. Such a fatal attraction was a subplot at the California EAR Unit’s concert, Wednesday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which opened with percussionist Arthur Jarvinen’s chamber music arrangement of “Larks’ Tongue in Aspic” by the progressive rock band King Crimson. Faithfully transcribed but radically altered in context, the idea sounds good on paper but, as over-brainy rock music and slumming chamber music, it suffered in translation to the concert stage.

The rock agenda reared its head again in Jack Vees’ “Piano Trio (Hulk Smash!!),” a brash piece for six hands (those of Vickie Ray, Lorna Eder and Dorothy Stone) on two grand pianos. Framed by thick, tolling chords--the hulk factor?--Vees’ piece shamelessly burrows into the rock vocabulary of obsessive chordal vamps and riffs and achieves moments of gutsy abandon.

In between came the poetic respite of Mexican composer Mario Lavista’s “Cuicani,” a sad and lovely duet for flute and clarinet deftly played by Dorothy Stone and James Rohrig, respectively.

By contrast, the concert’s second half paid respects to 20th century American icons. John Cage’s “Six Melodies for Violin and Piano,” smartly realized by pianist Vickie Ray and violinist Robin Lorentz, is one of the composer’s delicate diamonds in the rough, marked by deceptive simplicity and an eerily natural note flow.

The real guest of honor here, though, was the late Jacob Druckman. His 1992 piece, “Come Round,” delivered steamily and precisely by the Unit, is a three-movement invention that plays off cyclical materials and processes. It’s a piece that invents and reinvents itself, with a tension built up more from the foundation of emotional ambivalence and inquiry than fashionable angst.