Bryn-Julson Gives a Joyous, Stylish Recital

Like its peer organizations, Southwest Chamber Music specializes in variety, presenting over its winter and summer seasons a wide swath of differing chamber expressions. Friday and Saturday, at the semi-outdoors loggia at the Huntington Library in San Marino, Southwest offered a vocal recital by its distinguished member, Phyllis Bryn-Julson, who was assisted by pianist Gayle Blankenburg in a joyous program--music by Elliott Carter, Robert Schumann, Ruth Crawford Seeger and Amy Beach.

Carter’s “A Warble for Lilac Time” comes from the early 1940s, when many American composers were acutely aware of, and committed deeply to, their need to hang together and assert their nationality. In this happy song, set to a text of Walt Whitman, Carter responded in a later-to-be-uncharacteristic diatonic style, and served both poet and country handsomely.

Seeger’s Five Songs to Texts by Carl Sandburg (1929) sensitively complement the disparate texts in a minimal but touching way. Bryn-Julson performed them with a simple and skillful directness befitting their style.

Here and in the more overt piano parts of four songs by Beach, Blankenburg proved the perfect musical partner. Beach’s settings--she wrote more than 110 songs, the program notes said--should certainly have greater currency than they do.

At midprogram, the duo gave an understated but effective performance of Schumann’s “Frauenliebe und Leben,” one that specialized more in restraint than intensity.