Night of Whimsy, Wit From Jarvinen

Arthur Jarvinen is a familiar figure around the Los Angeles new music scene, thanks to his many years spent in the California EAR Unit, and he’s known as a composer whose ideas are centered in his private expressive world. Still, a fair amount of Jarvinen’s music has been commissioned and made manifest by others, which made an all-Jarvinen evening--presented with care by the increasingly impressive Ensemble Green on Saturday and including five L.A. premieres--a bit of a homecoming.

Part of Don Preston’s venturesome L.A. Visions series at the Downtown Playhouse, the concert was framed by mournful clangor--memorials composed for harsh-toned bell plates. Game-like strategies were represented too. The robust quartet “Be Good to Your Fingers and They Won’t Kill You” works from the anarchic to the semi-lucid. “Knight Moves” is an aleatoric piece with chessboard-like graphic notation. Its end effect involves tones that float indifferently and engage in fleeting, epiphanic embraces.

There were two mind-bending solos: “Pizzicato,” which Jarvinen wrote for his wife, cellist Lynn Angebranndt, who played her instrument bowlessly, as if it were an adolescent double bass whose voice had yet to change. Oboist Paul Sherman navigated the variations, and deviations, on a knotty theme that is “The Fifteen Fingers of Doctor Wu,” a canny study in melodic morphing.

Jarvinen has spent some time exploring the sensibility of Erik Satie, and two works were unabashedly Satie-inspired. Ensemble Green’s artistic director, pianist Bridget Convey, made the best of the elliptical “Four Rosicrucian Preludes” and, along with violist Kira Blumberg and percussionist Lynn Vartan, “Three Gymnopeies,” dedicated to gunshot victims John Lennon, Richard Brautigan and a classmate, Mark Cunningham. Unfortunately, a tuning-challenged piano prevented a reliable hearing.

Convey returned on a humbler apparatus, playing goofily bittersweet parts on the plastic Magnus chord organ, for Jarvinen’s illuminatingly whimsical “Microscoperas.” The mustached composer narrated the sparse, cryptic vignettes, with a pinch of “South Park” humor tossed in.

To his credit, it’s hard to sum up Jarvinen’s essential compositional voice, except to say that it can be quite playful, especially in its titling and schemes, while also conveying a cool introspection and arid wit.