Southwest Chamber Makes Poetic Match in Carter, Ravel

For a composer of putative abstraction, Elliott Carter is uncommonly sensitive to poetic imagery. On Thursday, Southwest Chamber Music matched three of his text-spurred works with two Ravel pieces, also of literary inspiration, in a tight, compelling program at the Museum of Tolerance.

“Of Challenge and of Love” sets five poems by John Hollander with Carter’s characteristic clarity of texture and complexity of motivic means. The widely and wildly ranging vocal lines are indeed disjunct at many points, and the accompaniment is hardly soothing to the harmonically inhibited, underscoring the latent anxieties of the texts. But there is also more than a hint of rest and resolution in both words and music.

Soprano Phyllis Bryn-Julson and pianist Gayle Blankenburg will record the work, and their performance Thursday was assured and focused.

Carter’s “Scrivo in Vento” and “Enchanted Preludes” were inspired by Petrarch and Wallace Stevens, respectively, but their expression is purely and idiomatically instrumental. Flutist Dorothy Stone sounded as secure as ever technically but rather blunt interpretively in “Scrivo in Vento,” but with cellist Maggie Edmondson she allowed the preludes to blossom in full fantasy.

Bryn-Julson’s voice did not seem fully engaged at the beginning of the Carter cycle, but it was an authoritative, sensuous marvel in Ravel’s “Chansons madecasses.”--Blankenburg, Stone and Edmondson supported her with equal flair and nuance.

To close there was the original piano four-hand version of “Ma Mere l’Oye,” in as caressively pointed a reading as could be wished, courtesy of Blankenburg and Susan Svrcek.

* The program repeats tonight at 8, Pasadena Presbyterian Church, 585 E. Colorado Blvd., $10-$20. (800) 726-7147.