An Impressive Range

Many people know composer Peter Schickele only in his immensely popular guise as the “discoverer” of works by P.D.Q. Bach, the fictitious black-sheep son of J.S. Bach.

Schickele has unearthed such long-lost P.D.Q. hits as “The Short-Tempered Clavier and Other Dysfunctional Works for Keyboard,” “Shepherd on the Rocks With a Twist” and “Twelve Quite Heavenly Songs” (which consists of five songs).

“There are almost 100 P.D.Q. Bach works now,” Schickele said in a recent phone interview from his home in New York City. “Quite an oeuvre. Maybe more than Faure wrote.”

But Schickele has always been a serious composer too, with numerous commissions for the National Symphony, the St. Louis Symphony, the Minnesota Opera, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Audubon and Lark string quartets and other organizations.

It’s this serious side that will be presented Monday when he joins the Lark Quartet in his Piano Quintet No. 2 at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

“Some people say, ‘Oh, the clown wants to play Hamlet,’ ” Schickele said. “To me, it’s a matter of ‘Is the clown as good at Hamlet as he is as a clown?’

“I can’t do without either. My sense of humor is a strong part of my personality, and it crops up in my serious music too. But I couldn’t be happy only doing P.D.Q. Bach discoveries either, because there are serious things that I want to get out too.”

Born in Ames, Iowa, in 1935, and brought up in Washington, D.C., and Fargo, N.D., Schickele studied composition at the Juilliard School of Music with Vincent Persichetti and William Bergsma. After a few years composing music for Los Angeles high schools under a Ford Foundation grant, he returned to Juilliard in 1961 to teach but gave that up four years later to become the freelance composer and performer that he remains.

How does he keep his mind straight between the two activities?

“To be truthful, sometimes my mind does veer,” he said. “It’s not very different at all. I can work on a P.D.Q. discovery and a Peter Schickele piece at the same time--at the same period, not literally at the same minute.

“But I tend to think of all music, even though it’s very abstract, in dramatic terms. Don’t give my pieces a plot, but if you’re reaching a climax in a serious piece, there has to be some striking gesture or something to make it worthy of being a climax.

“And if it’s a funny piece, there has to be a funny gag or a funny thing. Some P.D.Q. Bach pieces I’ve never recorded because the climactic [visual] moment [such as his piano bench exploding at the end of a cadenza] would be lost on a recording.”

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Schickele hasn’t been touring P.D.Q. Bach much during the last decade, but he will bring the P.D.Q. “Jekyll and Hyde Tour” to the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts on March 23.

Instead, he’s been concentrating on his syndicated radio program, “Schickele Mix,” broadcast over Public Radio International since 1992, and his serious music.

“I’m in the enviable position where I have more than I can handle, so to speak,” he said. “I used to be a pretty prompt composer. I’d get a piece done not literally on the date stated on the contract, but within a few weeks of it.

“But in the last couple of years, things have gotten out of hand. It’s a nice problem to have, but it is a problem. I have five commissions this year, every one put off from last year.”

His output has been largely orchestra, including two symphonies, a concerto for chamber orchestra, a cello concerto premiered last fall by the Pasadena Symphony and led by Jorge Mester, and a double concerto for violin and oboe to be premiered this summer at the Brevard Music Festival in North Carolina.

He wrote his Second Quintet in 1997 for the Lark Quartet, with whom he’s been touring for several years.

“When I was writing it, I realized it was the 100th anniversary of Brahms’ death,” the composer said. “The first movement of the piece seems to me particularly to have a very sort of Brahmsian feel. That doesn’t mean the language is Brahms, but the gestures feel quite Brahmsian to me.

“The last movement is real country music, real hoedown music. I’ve done that in several pieces. It’s a little bit like Brahms using Hungarian-flavored music for his finales.

“The slow movement is one of the most elegiac and floating slow movements I’ve ever written. The second movement is a sort of a scherzo. The piece covers a lot of territory emotionally.”

He’s particularly excited about both piano quintets because he can play them.

“I’m not a fine pianist,” he laughed. “I only play my own music in public and write what I can play. I love the Brahms F-minor (piano quintet), the Schubert E-flat (piano quartet) and the Dvorak A-major (quintet). But without practicing for years, I would never be able to play those pieces at a concert level. I don’t sight-read at an acceptable level even.

Schickele does have a virtuosic keyboard part in his quartet for violin, cello, clarinet and piano. It was written for someone else.

“I knew who was going to play that. So I wrote that not taking into account my technique at all. I couldn’t play it.”

SHOW TIMES

Peter Schickele will join the Lark Quartet in playing his Quintet No. 2 for Piano and Strings, Monday, Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive. Brahms’ Quartet in A minor, Opus 51, No. 2, will complete the program sponsored by the Laguna Chamber Music Society and the Philharmonic Society of Orange County. 8 p.m. $17 to $28. (714) 556-2787. For information on the March 23 Jekyll and Hyde tour at the Cerritos Center, call (656) 916-8500.

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Chris Pasles can be reached at (714) 966-5602 or by e-mail at chris.pasles@latimes.com.