Powell’s Miniatures Brought Vividly to Life

Like Webern and Grieg, Mel Powell was a miniaturist.

Of course, the late American composer, being remembered this week in twin concerts of his complete vocal music by soprano Phyllis Bryn-Julson and 12 colleagues of Southwest Chamber Music, won a Pulitzer Prize for a large-scale two-piano concerto. But that was an exception.

“Beautiful compression”--the description by Southwest’s Jeff von der Schmidt--marks these works, which were performed by Bryn-Julson and friends within less than two hours Saturday night in Pasadena Presbyterian Church.

But, “quietly fiendish”--a phrase from the premiere of “Duplicates,” the Pulitzer-winning score--also describes Powell’s style, one of myriad details, fine and subversive inner workings and a love of complexity. For all their handsome sounds and lyric success, these nine extended vocal works are also forbidding, abrasive and stubbornly atonal.

In eight of them--tenor David Spiro sang the Two Prayer Settings of 1963--Bryn-Julson clarified the murky, sent comprehensible words into the air, kept her tone pure and her sense of humor intact. The recording she and her colleagues make this week ought to be a document worth savoring.

The most masterly work in the canon may be “Little Companion Pieces,” which in 1979 ended Powell’s 10-year hiatus from composition--in that decade, he built the CalArts music school, “from the ground up,” to use his own words. Like the later “Settings” (also from 1979) and the “Strand Settings: Darker” (1983), these are miniatures of density and passion which deeply engage the listener in the poets’ worlds. In them are no false moves, only pure musical expression.

Southwest Chamber Music repeats this Mel Powell program at 8 p.m. Tuesday in Herbert Zipper Hall at the Colburn School of Performing Arts, 200 S. Grand Ave., downtown Los Angeles. $10-$20. (800) 726-7147.