Babbitt Played With Cohesive Charm

Milton Babbitt is one of those perennially misunderstood artistic figures, often deemed synonymous with all that is cerebral and unforgiving in 20th century concert music.

In fact, his music can be at once serious, colorful and engaging, like an intellectual argument that keeps weaving in and out of a casual conversation.

That was the impression, anyway, when Southwest Chamber Music conscientiously--and movingly--performed his 1986 work, “Groupwise for Solo Flute, Violin, Viola, Cello and Piano,” at the Norton Simon Museum Theater on Saturday. The performance honored Babbitt’s 85th birthday.

“Groupwise” is no picnic, for either players or listeners, given its determinedly atonal and arrhythmic designs. Still, once attuned to Babbitt’s language, cool charms emerge.

As the title implies, group think is a central idea, with small, intense pieces assembled into a musical mosaic in which the parts rule. Here, flutist Dorothy Stone and violinist Mark Menzies would gleam fleetingly, but no heroic soloist, or discernible theme, wins out in the hypnotic, objective note flow.

Few composers have quite managed Babbitt’s balancing act, creating music both ascetic and vibrant. And in this case it made musical allies with the opener, Mozart’s wondrous arrangement of Bach’s music, the Preludes and Fugues for String Trio, K. 404a.

These transcriptions, mostly from “Well-Tempered Clavier” and “The Art of the Fugue,” logically expand the music for violin, viola, and cello, accentuating the original music’s beautiful math and contrapuntal energy.

There was less apparent simpatico between Babbitt’s lucid chill and the Romantic contours of Brahms’ Trio in B for Violin, Cello and Piano, Opus 8. Though played well enough by Menzies, pianist Gayle Blankenburg and cellist Paula Fehrenbach, it sounded overheated and irrelevant in the context of the program.