Past, Future Present in Xtet Program

Much of the music of this waning century has been rather self-consciously obsessed with time and place and the tides of style. Certainly history was very much with us Monday evening at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as Xtet presented music with clear perspectives on past, present and future.

Framing the short program were Schoenberg’s “Weihnachtsmusik” (Christmas Music) and Opus 29 Suite. The familial Christmas work, from 1921, is a gentle carol arrangement firmly rooted in German Romantic traditions, while the Suite is one of those marvelously alive pieces in which Schoenberg cast the fresh energies of serialism into neoclassical forms.

Seldom happy with conventional programming expectations, Xtet began with the benign seasonal reverie and ended with the rigorous and provocative Suite, but in a well-shaped reading that led dramatically to its own benediction. Conductor Donald Crockett allowed chamber music individuality to flourish within generally tight ensemble work and his cast of virtuosos took advantage with warmly expressive playing.

Almost coeval with the Schoenberg pieces were the whimsical furies of the Italian Futurists. Aaron Jay Kernis has taken some of the inspired babble of movement founder F. T. Marinetti as the text for “Le Quattro Stagioni dalla Cucina Futurismo” and cross-examined it with tartly parodistic music for piano trio with its own vocal interactions. John Steinmetz was the straight-faced prophet of future cuisine, with violinist Elizabeth Baker, cellist Roger Lebow and pianist Vicki Ray his interlocutors cum accompanists.

Takemitsu’s “Rain Spell” extracts traditional Japanese resonances from a quintet of Western instruments in a poised incantation that says much about contemporary convergences and musical reconstruction. Flutist Gary Woodward, clarinetist Emily Bernstein, harpist JoAnn Turovsky, vibraphonist David Johnson and pianist Ray were the capable and communicative masters of color and point here.