Chamber Group Gives Piece a Fitting Debut

There are lots of little chamber music societies around, but Chamber Music Palisades is one that seems to be getting things right. Its fifth season opened Tuesday at St. Matthew’s Church with the world premiere of a striking piano quartet by Gernot Wolfgang at the center of the program.

The Austrian-born composer told the audience in Pacific Palisades that his concert music involves solving jazz/classical fusion problems. His compelling solutions in “Metamorphosis” sounded neither forced nor artificial. At its core, the piece is a wild minor swing spiked with Balkan Gypsy gestures and rhetoric.

It probably is not easy to play, but another thing Chamber Music Palisades gets right is ad hoc performances from its musicians. Violinist Ida Levin, violist Evan Wilson and cellist Wilhelmina Smith joined pianist and Palisades artistic co-director Delores Stevens in a tightly knit but exuberantly expressive premiere.

In its zesty exoticism, the new piece was a good match with Ravel’s Trio, after the intermission. The very resonant St. Matthew’s acoustic flattered the power and the color of another strong performance by Stevens, Levin and Smith. Less happy in that acoustic was the opening Serenade, Beethoven’s Opus 25. Flutist and artistic co-director Susan Greenberg, Levin and Wilson gave an almost model account of this intricately interactive mechanism, but all that interlocked detail came with a sort of sonic shadow that took some getting used to. Once that was accomplished, playing of enormous verve could be fully savored.