Southeast Asia, from the Southwest

Southwest Chamber Music made some history in the fall of 2006, becoming the first American ensemble to take up residence at Cambodia’s Royal University of Fine Arts and Vietnam’s Hanoi National Conservatory of Music since the fighting in Southeast Asia ended. Someone had to break the ice, and the ensemble is now in a position to act as a Western advocate for contemporary music from the region.

This presumably ongoing project surfaced modestly at Boston Court in Pasadena late Sunday afternoon with three works for strings by three different composers -- all between nine and 12 minutes in length and all U.S. premieres.

Him Sophy, a professor of music in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, has the grimmest personal story, his studies interrupted when the Khmer Rouge sent him to a forced labor camp for four years when he was 12. Yet the first piece he wrote after escaping the killing fields was a string quartet that betrays hardly a trace of what sounds as if it was a ghastly experience. Thoroughly tonal and somewhat Romantic, Westernized in development, bursting with joy and perhaps naivete, the piece has one flavorful signature: a brief, recurring violin motif in the first movement that dips down and up in a glide.

In contrast, Vietnam’s Vu Nhat Tan seems to be a determined modernist. His “Meditations & ABC” for violin and cello quickly became a series of gliding microtonal gestures that sometimes sounded like sirens interrupted by shooting wars of snapped and plucked strings.

The senior composer of the group, Phuc Linh, reverted to tonality in his string quartet, “Thien Thai,” which allegedly depicts a “fairy-tale world” of a peaceful Vietnam, everything generously and generically lyrical.

From just this sampling of roughly half an hour of music, it would be unwise to make any overarching generalizations about a regional style or styles. But one can say that the polyglot quartet of violinists Lorenz Gamma and Shalini Vijayan, violist Jan Karlin and cellist Fang Fang Xu (with Vijayan and Xu playing Vu Nhat Tan’s work) gave searching and attractive performances of these pieces, the lower strings glowing voluptuously in the Boston Court acoustics.

Mozart’s “Hunt” Quartet, K. 458 -- treated to comfortable tempos and a large, lush sound -- made a symmetrical counterbalance to the Southeast Asian pieces in terms of length. Jeff von der Schmidt, Southwest Chamber Music’s founding artistic director, noted from the stage that Mozart dedicated this quartet to his mentor, Haydn, making its inclusion here a gesture to the Vietnamese reverence for teachers -- a nice thing to contemplate.