A Lively First Night for Palisades

A viable personnel mixture--four resident artists and two guest soloists from the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra of New York--helped make the opening of Chamber Music Palisades’ third season Wednesday at St. Matthew’s Parish in Pacific Palisades provocative and lively. So did the repertory.

Maria Newman’s Sonata for Flute and Harpsichord, commissioned by the series, was the brand-new work on the program; it received a brilliant, solid premiere performance from the organization’s two founders, flutist Susan Greenberg and keyboard virtuoso Delores Stevens.

Attractive and accessible, as so much of Newman’s music seems to be, this entertaining and player-challenging work can be heard as either eclectic or derivative; it does not cut its own path. Witty, ironic and--in the fourth movement Largo, eerie--the work pleases through the jaunty familiarity of its invention, which owes something to Dutilleux and Shostakovich, among others.

One problem: the pairing of a modern flute and a harpsichord meant to sound like its Baroque models. The harpsichord could barely compete with the full-voiced flute; the playing field was uneven.

Except for a most felicitous performance of Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet, presided over elegantly by pianist Stevens, the rest of the program consisted of duos enlisting the talents of violinist Nancy Wu and contrabassist Leigh Mesh (the Met Orchestra visitors), violist John Hayhurst and cellist Timothy Landauer.

In Rossini’s three-movement Duetto for the unlikely combination of cello and double bass, Landauer and Mesh made consistently beautiful music, as did also Stevens and Wu in Mozart’s beloved Sonata in E minor--a key the composer never used anywhere else in his vast oeuvre, according to CMP’s amusing and knowledgeable on-the-spot annotator, Alan Chapman.