Serenades’ Seductive Yet Chattering ‘Black Waltz’

Put the dark, neo-Romantic ironies of new tango into 3/4 time and you would get something like John Biggs’ new string quintet “Black Waltz for a Gossiping Diva.” Fitfully seductive and programmatic to a fault, “Black Waltz” was the centerpiece of the opening program for Pacific Serenades’ 15th season, Sunday afternoon at the Neighborhood Church in Pasadena.

Biggs’ inconclusive scenario for the piece, inspired by Norman Rockwell’s painting “Gossip,” has a retired diva attending a formal waltz in her honor, dancing in stately decadence but with frequent stops for gossip among old friends. This is characterized by chittering bits of aleatoric improvisation, played for laughs rather at odds with the haunted elegance of the waltz.

Violinists Roger Wilkie and Connie Kupka, violist Victoria Miskolczy and cellists Davis Speltz and Cecilia Tsan urged it with appropriately neurotic power and grace. They squeaked the instrumental chatter bravely, with even some miming thrown in, but to little effect, and the quintuple formal scheme seemed formulaic and foregone.

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The Pacific Serenades pattern matches a premiere with a standard for the same instrumentation. In this case it was no less than Schubert’s revered C-major Quintet. This strong ensemble, ad hoc but clearly sympathetic and interactive, reveled in its sonorities, playing with warm, expressive sound, generous in sentiment but purposefully motivated.

To open there was Martinu’s 1927 Duo for violin and cello, pseudo-Baroque in line and form a la Kreisler, hothouse Parisian in spirit a la Enesco. Wilkie and Speltz delivered with outgoing bravura.