Moving beyond the hits with pianist Susan Svrcek

It wasn’t so long ago that Heitor Villa-Lobos and Carlos Chavez were known as one-hit composers. Villa-Lobos wrote a very pretty tune for soprano and eight cellos, “Bachianas brasileira No. 5,” that captured even the ear of comedian Ernie Kovacs. He made it a showpiece for his wife, Edie Adams, who sang it, surrounded by a halo of cellos, on his innovative 1950s television program.

Chavez wrote a spicy, toe-tapping orchestral work, “Sinfonia India,” that Leonard Bernstein introduced to a generation of television kids eager to hear new instruments, rhythms and colors. That’s where the classical action was in those days.

But neither piece is particularly representative of its composer, we find out as we get to know the men’s output better. Witness the works that dominated Susan Svrcek’s Piano Spheres recital Tuesday in Zipper Hall at the Colburn School of Performing Arts.

Villa-Lobos can be angry and confrontational and a bit of a bore. Chavez can be thorny beyond belief.

In 1949, both wrote tributes to Chopin on the centenary of the Polish composer’s death. In his two-part “Hommage a Chopin,” Villa-Lobos took quasi-narrative forms that Chopin perfected -- the nocturne and the ballade -- out of the European salon and transported them persuasively to the pungent world of Villa-Lobos’ native Brazil.

Chavez, in his “Estudio (Homenaje a Chopin),” focused on technical problems such as those addressed in the Chopin Etudes. He wrote an astringent, abstract piece that severely challenges a pianist’s rhythmic sense and independence of hands.

Svrcek sailed through both works, as she did afterward through a straightforward performance of Chopin’s moody Barcarolle in F sharp. Yet though it was nice to hear Chopin in this context, his music is so much in the ear and mind that the experience failed to illuminate either this work or the two homages.

The rest of the program included Chavez’s compacted, nervous and unsettled Sonata No. 3, during which Svrcek began to have problems with a contact lens. Although she didn’t appear to let that affect her playing, she had to stop later -- about a third of the way through Villa-Lobos’ “Rudepoema” (Savagepoem) -- to go offstage and adjust it.

Returning, she started the whole piece over. The repeat helped clarify at least part of the structure of this amazingly difficult work, composed in the angry and devastated postwar world of the 1920s. Perhaps two complete hearings would have dispelled the impression that Villa-Lobos was making the same point again and again.

Svrcek also played USC composer Andrew Norman’s mood-contrasting Two Studies for Solo Piano, with Norman present at the end to take bows. Schumann’s “Widmung” (Dedication) was her single encore.