Three continents, three visions

At the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena on Saturday night, Southwest Chamber Music played music from three continents that remained tethered, after a fashion, to UCLA.

The line ran from the Austrian giant Arnold Schoenberg, who taught at the university, to Lou Harrison, an American student of Schoenberg there, to Joan Huang, who came from Shanghai to study at UCLA and now lives in Altadena not far from the armory. And there were musical connections as well.

Harrison’s “Varied Trio” for piano, violin and percussion (1987) was an archetype of the late composer’s impressions of Asian music -- limpid, graceful, pastoral, drenched in pentatonic melodies, conjuring a peaceful polyglot world with an economy of means. To cite only one example of Harrison’s offbeat unified vision, there’s the final movement, in which the violin flows along in an Indian manner and the percussionist taps out a lovely obbligato on all kinds of objects -- tambourines, brake drums, even frying pans.

If Harrison leaned to the East for his inspiration, Huang seems to look West in “Impressions on Gusu” -- a world premiere Saturday. Symmetry plays a big part in this work, for she channels memories of her visit to six historical sites in Suzhou (a city near Shanghai) into a six-movement piece for six Western instruments. Also, the short movements are of nearly equal length, all but one clocking in at two to three minutes (with the fourth pushing the limit to about 3:12).

In the program, the movements were subtitled “mini-concertos,” since each is supposed to highlight one instrument of the group in the following order: cello, flute, viola, clarinet, piano and violin. In the listening, however, the dense, atonal, polyphonic texture usually overwhelmed the designated solo instrument, making the whole work a concerto grosso of sorts in an idiom most audibly descended from that of Schoenberg.

Nevertheless, Huang’s ancestry was strong enough to assert itself in this complex stream with some pitch-bending techniques, a Chinese tune that Puccini used in the massive choruses of “Turandot” for the sixth movement and a magnificent swirling climax in the fifth movement.

Schoenberg the numerologist might have appreciated the extension of the number 6 into the choice of the original string sextet version of his ultra-Romantic “Verklarte Nacht” as the concert’s finale. Although the group’s intonation wasn’t always spot on, the performance grew deeper and better as it unfolded, with a big, dark, voluptuous sonority in the small gallery that you could feel vibrating in your head.

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Southwest Chamber Music

Where: Zipper Hall, Colburn School of Performing Arts, 200 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When: 8 tonight

Price: $10 to $38

Contact: (800) 726-7147 or www.swmusic.org