Cuarteto Matinee Hails Del Aguila, Feldman

The 11-day Ventura Chamber Music Festival, which concluded Sunday, presented the fourth and final performance by the Cuarteto Latinoamericano on Saturday with a genuine matinee performance--at 10 o’clock in the morning.

The intimate and pleasing venue was the foyer of San Buenaventura City Hall in Ventura, where the ensemble’s program included works by Miguel del Aguila, who played the piano in his new “Clocks,” Bernardo Feldman, who was also present, the late Heitor Villa-Lobos and the late Alberto Ginastera. A capacity audience of 214 loudly indicated its approval.

In Feldman’s “A fuego lento” (Embers), the Cuarteto made its strongest statement in its performance of a masterly tone-poem of alternating lyric and dramatic sensibilities. In the highly chromatic, neo-Bergian work, Feldman compresses into 13 short minutes a deeply felt abstract narrative. All that was missing in the ensemble’s otherwise touching playing of it was a consistently beautiful tone; quality of tone regularly seems to occupy a low place in the quartet’s priorities--intensity and dramatic unity take precedence.

Actually, del Aguila’s “Clocks” for piano quintet--commissioned by the festival--offered little drama or intensity, however, and then only at its conclusion. “Clocks” is an entertaining piece for quartet and piano, lightweight and accessible, but arrives at its true status as a piano quintet only in the final and sixth movement, when it uses all the resources of the ensemble. The previous five movements resemble an aural travelogue: musical postcards of timepieces. Clever it is, as clever as the composer’s wily spoken program notes. And, at the end, the audience stood and cheered.

The historical works, Villa-Lobos’ Quartet No. 3 (1913) and Ginastera’s First Quartet (1948), received tight and compelling readings. Ginastera’s commanding, fervent work, in particular, gripped the listener throughout its inexorable progress.

One must be grateful to the four members of Cuarteto Latinoamericano--violinists Saul and Aron Bitran, violist Javier Montiel and cellist Alvaro Bitran--for another reminder of the neglected riches in the literature they espouse. (And, yes, the Bitrans are related; they’re brothers.)