Guitarist, Flutist Give Balanced Recital

Music in art-designated spaces can either suffer or benefit from the surroundings. The latter was, fortunately, the case when guitarist Stuart Fox and flutist Dorothy Stone gave a recital in the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena Sunday evening, part of the Southwest Chamber Music’s Soliloquy Recital series.

They gained an unwittingly striking backdrop by performing in front of Tom Wudl’s large painting “The Rapture of Dionysius,” in which items from the animal and consumer goods kingdoms fly about the cosmos, dislodged from their earthly moorings. So it went, much of the time, with the music.

Thematic threads, though loosely woven, gave the program cohesion, showcasing 20th century music from Japan, late 20th century music from Cal Arts faculty and Astor Piazzolla to cap it off.

The Argentine Piazzolla and Japanese Toru Takemitsu share the distinction of being composers outside the American-European orbit who have served to expand and enlighten the world’s musical culture. With poetic aplomb, Stone and Fox played the neo-impressionist piece “Toward the Sea” of Takemitsu, and the juicy genre-survey of Piazzolla’s “Histoire du Tango,” delivered with panache if not always squeaky-clean precision on Fox’s part.

They also opened with the reflective atonality--an almost nostalgic quality these days--of Mao Yamagishi, and premiered Cal Arts-based, jazz/world music/classical composer Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith’s “Dawn and Dusk.” It’s a cryptic charmer, with its bittersweet harmonies punctuated by frenetic outbursts, first played in a version with only the guitar part, and later with the flute part added.

Also from Cal Arts, Stephen L. Mosko had his alternately arid and warm, dissonant and sweet “Rapuze” premiered. The short work played up the considerable strengths of the musical unit, the female portion of which happens to be his wife.