Southwest Honors Schoenberg and Stravinsky

For much of the musical world 50 years ago, it was choose sides: Schoenberg or Stravinsky. Now we are becoming a little more comfortable with the idea of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, something that Southwest Chamber Music is helping this season. The second of its programs matching works that the two composers wrote in Los Angeles, given Saturday evening at the Norton Simon Museum, proved a stimulating success on several fronts.

Excepting the little canon composed as a birthday greeting for Thomas Mann, the Schoenberg pieces here are among his most intensely dramatic. The “Ode to Napoleon,” begun after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, is a public denunciation, almost a ceremonial rite of moral outrage. The String Trio, written just weeks after Schoenberg was revived from an almost-fatal heart attack in 1946, is a personal drama, but no less fiercely expressed.

The “Ode” was a flat-out tour de force, spoken with incandescent conviction by Michael Ingham, with Jeff von der Schmidt conducting violinists Mark Menzies and Johnny Chang, violist Jan Karlin, cellist Paula Fehrenbach and pianist Gayle Blankenburg. The string quartet also gave a taut reading of the rarely heard canon, while Menzies, Karlin and Fehrenbach were less consistent but still effective in the Trio.

In some ways, it seemed to take the death of Schoenberg in 1951 to give Stravinsky the freedom to work with the serial techniques pioneered by his Brentwood neighbor.

Among his earliest efforts assimilating, stretching and redirecting those techniques were two lyrical gems, the Septet and Three Songs from William Shakespeare.

The form of both of these tripartite works might be described as head, heart and dancing feet. Von der Schmidt kept them bright and nimble, though a persistent electronic hum marred the first two movements of the Septet.

Kathleen Roland was Shakespeare’s bright, articulate singer, and Karlin completed the program with Stravinsky’s eloquently mournful Elegy for solo viola.