Rare Treats From Dorian Wind Quintet

Wind quintets are few and far between in the ranks of established chamber groups, which lends the Dorian Wind Quintet, at age 36, an unusual air of seasoning. As it demonstrated in concert Saturday night at El Camino College in Torrance, this is a group that combines polish with vigor and isn’t afraid of sidestepping the familiar, as on this program of four works by relatively unknown living composers.

This program’s centerpiece, the premiere of Billy Childs’ “A Day in the Forest of Dreams,” had a local angle. Pianist-composer Childs is a hometown phenomenon busy carving out a career between the jazz and classical worlds.

For this commission, Childs left most of his jazz vocabulary at home, except when it comes to his own chord voicings and swing inflections on piano. Here, Childs draws on a neoimpressionistic palette, with traces of Ravel as heard through the filter of a jazz musician’s ear. More agitation and complexity rear their heads in the second movement, building to a climactic fury.

The quintet sailed through Lee Hoiby’s “Diversions for Wind Quintet,” with diversionary tactics suggesting Stravinsky in a lightheaded mood, and Robert Ward’s “Raleigh Divertimento,” another treatise in agreeable modernist sonorities.

Meatier musical thinking came via young composer David Sampson’s “Short Stories for Wind Quintet.” Boundaries of tonality are stretched and strange emotional states evoked, in a piece that nicely exploits the coloristic possibilities of this format, generally, and the strengths of this impressive group, specifically.