A Safer Southwest Chamber Still Plays It Gracefully

For its summer evening concerts at the Huntington Art Gallery Loggia in San Marino, Southwest Chamber Music, one of our more consistently adventuresome explorers of new music, becomes a safer ensemble. Familiar Schubert, Beethoven and Brahms--with a brief excursion into Mel Powell--made up the Southwest’s latest program Friday.

The venue, a colonnaded portico overlooking the gardens, is a good one for chamber music, probably as good as you’ll find outdoors in a big city. The inevitable aircraft and sirens made their usual interruptions, but in general the acoustics allow plenty of instrumental warmth and expressive nuance to come through.

Three players new to Southwest Chamber Music (the group recently dropped the word “Society” from its name) were the featured performers. Violinist Amy Sims, cellist Marilyn Harris-Bardet and pianist Gayle Blankenburg proved themselves assured technicians and graceful communicators, though the performances varied in finish.

Their account of Brahms’ B-major Trio, Opus 8, which concluded the program, was a highlight. This resplendently scored, lavishly emotional score often tempts musicians into overkill--from first note to last they give their luscious most. Here, the players weighed the notes more carefully, listened to one another and found musical clauses, sentences and paragraphs.

Sims firmly outlined the doodles of Powell’s Nocturne for Solo Violin. In the eight-minute work, Powell was inspired by an exhibition of paintings in which many of the works were created quickly, sometimes in less than an hour. Applying similar speed to musical composition, Powell came up with this craggy yet freely flowing Nocturne, filled with ideas brief, both wispy and snarled, floating on a white background of silence. Sims relished the silences, pacing the work like an extended cadenza.

Blankenburg’s performance of the “Moonlight” Sonata suffered from some minor mechanical slips and remained firmly earthbound interpretively. Schubert’s voluptuous “Notturno” (for piano trio) served as the concert opener, in a sometimes sparkling, sometimes mundane run-through.