Divergent Samples of 20th Century Music

At the Museum of Tolerance on Thursday, Southwest Chamber Music posed the musical question: Who’s afraid of 20th century music? The program proved modest in musical forces, but rich in sensory provocation and not at all difficult.

Underrated composer Ernst Krenek (1900-1991), a German who landed in Southern California, was one of those modern figures who saw the light, stylistically speaking, and more than once, as heard via two divergent examples on the program. “Drei Gesange, Opus 56,” sung here by Krenek specialist baritone Michael Ingham, was written in a neo-romantic mode in 1927, 60-odd years before his semi-serialist piece String Trio in 12 Stations, Opus 237, circa 1985.

That work, played boldly by violinist Agnes Gottschewski, violist Jan Karlin and cellist Maggie Edmondson, was commissioned by the Alban Berg Foundation, and echoes the concision and detailing of Berg, as well as a rare liberation from both sentimentality and cerebral chill.

Vocal works of Poulenc veered in another direction, where dry wit prevailed. “Le bestiare ou Cortege d’ Orphee” is a series of six fetching, sneeze-you-miss-it miniatures, invested with precisely the right salty sweetness by Ingham, now confident, now lost in a quiver, now scooting into a vulnerable falsetto. Accompanied, as before, by pianist Susan Svrcek, Ingham brought a similar duality to Poulenc’s “Le Bal Masque,” in which the music can be alternately gaudy and giddy, but complements the clenched playfulness of Max Jacobs’ text.

From yet another musical-historical corner, Milhaud wrote “Les Reves de Jacob, Opus 294” in honor of Israel’s statehood, in 1954. The Southwest’s quintet gave respectable form to the piece, in which Milhaud’s palatable modernism offers a warily hopeful air. An anthem-like finale with just a tinge of emotional qualification seems fitting for a nation born into conflict.