Lively Performances Give a Lift to Pro Musicis’ Season Opener

The thought of a mostly 20th century concert program could strike fear or apathy into the hearts of conservative listeners. But the music heard Sunday afternoon at the Zipper Concert Hall was kind on the ears, almost to a fault.

For the first event in the Pro Musicis season, a trio of accomplished, poised players--flutist Stephanie Jutt, oboist Gerard Reuter and pianist Jeffrey Sykes--opened with a vigorous splash of Baroque music, courtesy of Telemann’s Sonata in C Minor for flute, oboe and continuo. From there, though, the program leaned on a set of more modern works that were refreshingly offbeat, though they paled qualitatively in comparison to the opening salvo.

Jutt and Sykes performed Paul Schoenfield’s “Four Souvenirs for Violin and Piano,” transcribed for flute by Jutt. True to the title, the composer plays vernacular tourist, trying his hand at samba, tango and square dance idioms, to glibly amusing effect. Reuter neatly captured the emotional ambivalence of Poulenc’s Sonata for Oboe and Piano, with its slow-fast-slow succession of movements that ends in polytonal irresolution.

Reuter also played solo, admirably, on Benjamin Britten’s “Six Metamorphoses After Ovid,” an evocative set of miniature musical portraits, with specific gestures and harmonic colors suiting various mythic figures. “Nyobe,” for instance, is as melancholy as “Bacchus” is pumped up with spry wit.

Jutt turned Prokofiev’s “Five Songs Without Words” from a vocal piece into a beautiful flute piece. The work, written while the composer was in Hollywood, behaves with a vaguely French, Postimpressionist air rather than Russian heft.

Little-known British composer Madeleine Dring’s Trio closed the program, a forgettable nicety to finish a perfectly harmless, dashingly performed concert.