Southwest Chamber Glories in the Offbeat

Deliciously offbeat programming distinguished Saturday’s concert from Southwest Chamber Music at Pasadena Presbyterian Church. No earthshaking, mind-rattling revelations were to be heard, and there was nary a warhorse in the house, but the evening amounted to a humbly scaled feast of pleasant 20th century surprises.

It might be said that the program’s most timely, fashionable work was the Fourth Quartet, “Musica de feria,” of great Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas. If he has yet to achieve household-name status, Revueltas, who died in 1940, has enjoyed a generous groundswell of interest in recent years, particularly in Southern California.

This Quartet, like Revueltas’ best work, is rustic and gutsy, rooted in the soil of Mexican folk music but also clearly linked to Modernist thinking. A sweetly languid middle section plays like a wistful lullaby between the stampedes, the tonal swerves and restless propulsion that signify the composer’s gruff erudition.

From Ruth Crawford Seeger’s 1931 Quartet came only the Andante movement, a hypnotic lament whose textures are built up from closely voiced tones that thicken and thin in a painterly fashion. We wanted to hear more.

The in-house quartet--violinists Agnes Gottschewski and Christine Frank, violist Jan Karlin and cellist Maggie Edmondson--played with a taut ensemble ethos, and they rose to the varied challenges of the concert’s first half.

When it comes to Wadada Leo Smith’s chamber music, the built-in challenge relates to Smith’s desire to find life in the cracks between the written score and improvised musical actions.

Smith’s Quartet No. 1, written in 1969, literally plots open white spaces between fragments of writing, and the players hover around one another’s activity, making an alternately aligning and dissipating collective sound. To their credit, these players made music under chancy circumstances.

Compared to the rigors and angles of the string quartet music, the concert’s second half, offering Carlos Chavez’s ballet “La hija de Colquide,” seemed tame. An octet, conducted by Jeff von der Schmidt, did an admirable job whipping up its moody musical agenda. It’s a pretty, reflective, picturesque thing, but on this program, outshined by its more charismatic musical neighbors.