Two Pianists Survey Cadences of Music of the 20th Century

On paper, the two-piano performance by Gloria Cheng-Cochran and Vicki Ray at the latest Monday Evening Concert looked like it would be a pleasant but rambling mini-survey of 20th century music.

In the playing though, the program, at the Bing Theater of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, moved apprehendably, book-ended by French temperament, with Germanic modernism at the core.

It began and ended with in a light vein: Stravinsky’s neoclassic Sonata--though written in Hollywood in 1943-44, its sounds are from a decade earlier and a continent away--and Ravel’s virtuosic, irresistible “La Valse,” both showing off the pianists’ technical resources and command of styles.

At the center, in Charles Wuorinen’s transcription of Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra, the players failed to achieve real variety in tone production, a wide range of dynamics or the projection of imagined colors.

As a result, their reading emerged gray rather than fully realized. Wuorinen’s claim in a program note that “what we lose in color . . . we gain in clarity” wasn’t aurally substantiated.

David Lang’s non-narrative “Orpheus Over and Under” (1989) let its minimalist obsession with repeated notes and chords carry the logic and thrust. Regardless of the possible physical punishment involved in the work--those nonstop intense repetitions--the result was 19 minutes of amusement.

Between the Stravinsky and Lang, Cheng-Cochran and Ray played a genuine French piece, Debussy’s “Lindaraja” (1901); it sounds like a warmup for the better-known “Soiree dans Grenade,” which came two years later.