Charging through heat and Chavez

Back in the 1990s, Southwest Chamber Music found itself a terrific summer home at the Huntington Library -- and 10 seasons later, the group continues to hold court there.

The setting is both gorgeous and distinguished, with the sloping lawn and palm trees perfectly framed by the white pillars of the porch outside the main art gallery where the concerts take place. Acoustically, the place works, too, as the ceiling and moldings over the concert space form the equivalent of a shed; the sound is full yet intimate, projected toward the listeners, not at all dry. Anyone who has been to Tanglewood will recognize the ambience in this Southern Californian translation, and on Saturday night, we also had to put up with, alas, Tanglewood weather -- hot, humid, uncomfortable.

For the season opener, Southwest Chamber Music’s string quartet (Lorenz Gamma and Shalini Vijayan on violins, Jan Karlin on viola and Peter Jacobson on cello) played it relatively safe, with Haydn and Mozart framing Carlos Chavez’s String Quartet No. 1. Southwest Chamber Music has vigorously taken up the cause of Chavez, the Mexican master whose music has been overshadowed of late by that of his unruly colleague, Silvestre Revueltas.

The group performed a cycle of the Chavez quartets this past season, and its latest CD release, just out on the Cambria label, is the first of a projected four-volume survey of all of Chavez’s chamber works.

In the case of Chavez’s Quartet No. 1 (1921), we heard a young composer who charges headlong through kaleidoscopic landscapes or produces a blended, brooding adagio that breaks briefly into the sunlight. Annotator Jeff von der Schmidt rightly points to the Shostakovich resemblance in the sonorities -- whose quartets Chavez anticipates by 20 years and more -- and I also catch a Villa-Lobos-like strain in Chavez’s restless, audience-friendly yet not quite cogent attempts to rechannel European influences.

Elsewhere, the quartet produced a luscious, full-blooded, unified collective tone, injecting a good sense of rhythmic definition into Haydn’s String Quartet Op. 76, No. 3 “Emperor” and making graceful, fluid yet robust work of the Mozart String Quintet, K. 515, audibly (at least) unfazed by the hothouse conditions. In the Mozart, the foursome was joined by violist Karen Elaine-Bakunin.