Southwest travels an eastern route to get to Mozart

As Southwest Chamber Music continued its current season under the umbrella title “Global Wanderings,” Saturday night at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, the question of the rest of the world’s effect on Western classical music sneaked into the mix. “Global Wanderings” seemed a relevant but also relative term, in a series that willfully veers out of the Eurocentric repertoire but also comes home to that base.

Saturday’s program (to be repeated tonight at the Colburn School of Music) headed to points east but landed squarely back in the land of conventional chamber-music plenty with Mozart’s Quintet in A for Clarinet and Strings. We got Indonesian-inspired writing from the late Lou Harrison, who lived in Northern California most of his life. And composer Joan Huang displayed the invention and vibrancy of her East-West musical vocabulary, leaning only semi-wistfully toward her native Chinese heritage.

Harrison’s “Songs in the Forest” opened the concert tenderly, with its varied three-part structure conveying in turn cool introspection, vigorous rhythmic kneading and long-lined lyricism. The flavor was Indonesian, as per Harrison’s wont, but translated to Western instrumentation, with Beth Pflueger on flute and piccolo, Shalini Vijayan on violin, Ming Tsu on piano and Lynn Vartan on vibraphone and marimba.

Vartan returned on marimba to supply the requisite woody grace and evocation for two of Huang’s compact but alluring pieces. “Dragons Rising & Tigers Leaping” matches the energy of its title with a brightness and restlessness of spirit, all clear pentatonic colors and tonal unrest, punctuated by smeared clusters of notes. The active and wide-ranging score kept the impressive Vartan on her feet.

Huang’s “The Legend of Chang-e,” with Vartan joined by Vijayan, is a more abstract piece in some ways but also more imbued with an underlying narrative design. The interactive energies of the players and regular shifts of dynamics and tonality suggest a storyteller’s art.

After intermission, the Mozart, played lovingly by a quintet featuring clarinetist Jim Foschia, rounded out the evening with its amalgam of comfort, joy and clarity.

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Southwest Chamber Music

Where: Zipper Hall, Colburn School of Performing Arts, 200 S. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 8 tonight

Price: $25

Contact: (800) 726-7147