Chamber Group Ideal Fit for Architecture Exhibit

Having enhanced “Shaping The Great City: Modern Architecture in Central Europe: 1890-1937” during its run in Montreal, the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s Chamber Music Festival did so Saturday night at the Getty Center, where the exhibition is currently running.

This was one of the more stimulating matches the Getty has made, for as the architecture in the Austro-Hungarian Empire was infiltrated by new ideas in those years, so were their cities’ musical scenes--and the pieces that these very capable musicians performed often suggested an urban atmosphere that mirrored the exhibition.

Representing Vienna, Berg’s passionate Piano Sonata, Op. 1, and Schoenberg’s curious encounter with then-pop culture--Brettl Lieder (Cabaret Songs)--found the composers still working within tonality while pushing it to its limits.

In outlying areas, tonality wasn’t so much the issue as ethnicity--the use of zesty Czech folk dances in Hans Krasa Tanz and Gideon Klein’s remarkable String Trio, or the anything-goes eclecticism of Erwin Schulhoff.

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Soprano Karina Gauvin threw herself completely into Schoenberg’s songs, singing with expressive ardor and freedom as pianist Richard Raymond matched her rubato for rubato.

On his own, Raymond’s performance of the Berg tended to wander, and you could not feel any rhythm in the languorously phrased dances from Schulhoff’s Jazz Etudes (the composer played them faster, with a steady, pronounced swing, on his 1928 recordings), nor the encore (Zez Confrey’s “Kitten on the Keys”).

But the trio of violinist Yehonatan Berick, violist/artistic director Neal Gripp, and cellist Antonio Lysy nailed the Krasa and Klein works with lusty abandon and bite.