Bowes-Alberga Concert Weds Site, Sound

Regular patrons of the Da Camera Society’s Chamber Music in Historic Sites series have come to expect dramatic, ad hoc venues, as the series lands in finer structures around the Southland. An unusual degree of serendipity arose Sunday afternoon, when the striking British duo of violinist Thomas Bowes and pianist Eleanor Alberga performed in the Ross House in Malibu.

This neo-streamline moderne structure is perched directly over the ocean--whose heightened activity of late has made headlines.

With its compact, balanced program, Bowes-Alberga--partners in music and marriage--showed its considerable strengths and subtleties against a dazzling picture window vista of the sea.

Unabashedly celebrating their stylistic range, they manifested Baroque poise for Bach’s Sonata for Violin and Keyboard in E, S. 1016, and then explored the frictional conceptual strategies of “The Wild Blue Yonder” by Alberga, a noted composer as well as a fine pianist. Her 1995 piece, heard in its Los Angeles premiere, engagingly pits one instrument against the other, as they play furtive fragments, striving for unity that never quite arrives.

The beauty of the backdrop peaked to the point of distraction when a pod of dolphins began frolicking in the middle of Beethoven’s Sonata Opus 23 in A minor, in the second of two performances. However pristine the musical efforts in the room, attention was naturally diverted.

Then again, the gentle rumble of waves and the stunning visuals seemed made-to-order as the duo ladled out the deceptively minimal “Spiegel im Spiegel,” written in 1978 by popular Estonian composer Arvo Part. More than most living composers, Part has coaxed profundity from simple language.

Here, the lulling interplay of arpeggios and long tones, combined with the oceanfront context, made for an inspired accord of site and sound.