Rainy day, sunny music

Outside the rain was pouring, and inside the Pasadena Neighborhood Church, occasional drips added unwanted beats to a Pacific Serenades concert Sunday afternoon. Fortunately, the drips were quickly muffled and the gloomy mood dispelled by sensitive and bright music-making.

Enhancing the change was Maria Newman’s “Pennipotenti” (Latin for “birds,” or, more literally, Newman told the audience in her introductory remarks, “strong feathers”), the latest in the 70-plus commissions premiered by the group, which flutist and composer Mark Carlson founded in 1982.

An attractive four-movement suite for flute, violin and viola, “Pennipotenti” created colorful images and feelings of soaring movement. “The Dipper,” the opening rondo, alternated passages of perky chattering and quieter musing with the sophisticated wit of 20th century French chamber works.

The chorale-like “The Snowy Owl” recalled the gentle openness of Copland’s American West. In “The Hummingbird,” the flute floated above the dancing strings. “The Falcon” closed the piece with compacted, almost Eastern European harmonies somehow suggesting weightlessness and waiting in the heights prior to passages of quickening, devastating action.

Carlson, violinist Phillip Levy and violist Roland Kato were the accomplished players.

Next, for the third piece on the four-part bill, violinist Connie Kupka and cellist David Speltz joined Carlson and Kato for a sunny performance of Mozart’s bucolic two-movement Quartet for Flute and Strings in C, K. 285b.

At the darker end of the emotional scale, Speltz opened the concert with an intensely personal and expressive account of Bach’s Suite in D minor for solo cello, BWV 1008. Levy, Kupka, Kato and Speltz closed it with an intense performance of Shostakovich’s war-tormented String Quartet No. 10.

Rain or shine, the program will be repeated tonight at the UCLA Faculty Center.

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Pacific Serenades

Where: UCLA Faculty Center, 405 N. Hilgard Ave., Westwood

When: 8 tonight

Price: $29

Contact: (213) 534-3434 or www.pacser.org