Compelling Copland House Builds on Its Repertory’s Joy

Monday Evening Concerts has a long history with the music of Aaron Copland, ardently championed as it was by the series’ longtime director Lawrence Morton as far back as the 1940s.

That honored past became a present joy on the latest installment of the venerable series, when Music From the Copland House arrived at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art with its traveling Copland centennial tribute.

The beauties of the Copland House playing were also a cause for some pangs of regret. It should not take a major anniversary to hear this music so seductively done.

Copland’s chamber music is as utterly characteristic as his better-known orchestral and theater/film music, spacious in texture and sonority, natural in instrumental idiom and above all vital in tune and rhythm at any speed.

The piano quartet repertory, for example, is not so burdened with masterpieces that a work such as Copland’s 1950 Quartet should get lost in the crush.

Copland’s subversive personal manipulation of 12-tone techniques in it drew some heat at the time, but the fey mysteries of the outer movements and the vigorous snap of the quirky jostle in the middle have outlived the polemics.

Ensemble members (the group is named after Copland’s home, in New York state, which is not a creative music center) pianist Michael Boriskin, violinist Maria Bachmann, violist Hsin-Yun Huang and cellist Wilhelmina Smith certainly made the piece sound like a classic, secure in concept and execution.

Perfectly caught were Copland’s shifting tides of tension, the piano and string energies opposed, united and then divided again, with the four musicians well-balanced in sound and spirit.

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The 1929 piano trio “Vitebsk” is more commonly encountered, but seldom as incisively shaped as by Bachmann, Smith and Boriskin.

Their “Vitebsk” was a place of dark furies, dispersed for a time in rambunctious dance, but returning in edgy, regimented violence.

The lyrical Copland of wide-ranging reverie came to the fore in the 1943 Sonata for Violin and Piano, played with elegance and grace by Bachmann and Boriskin.

There was a similar shape and feel to the Duo for Flute and Piano, completed in 1971, played with pert or pensive charm as required by Boriskin and Paul Lustig Dunkel, the co-directors of music from the Copland House.

The two Threnodies for flute and string trio, in memory of Stravinsky and Beatrice Cunningham (cellist and sister to Lawrence Morton), completed the compelling and carefully crafted program, itself in the shape of a typical Copland arch.