A month ago, William Kraft turned 85, and about that time the composer finished the series of chamber pieces he calls "Encounters," which he began in the early '70s. "Encounters XV" had its world premiere Monday night at Zipper Concert Hall as the final work in the final concert of Southwest Chamber Music's three-concert survey of the series.

Kraft is a renowned percussionist, and percussionists can sometimes be defensive. In remarks to the audience between pieces - helping fill time during the long periods required for setups - he explained the usual route percussionists take. "First they become drummers," he said cheerfully. "Then they become percussionists. Then they become musicians." He also noted that expressivity works its way down in the orchestra, with string instruments having the greatest emotional resources and percussionists the least.

But in the ability to create a variety of sounds, percussion is tops. And new sounds, Kraft explained, are his passion. Every work in the "Encounters" series is novel. In fact, Kraft makes one wonder if the fountain of youth might not be hidden amid all those gongs, bells, drums and marimbas. Could the vibrations of a vibraphone be a miracle anti-aging device? No one would take Kraft, with the spring in his step and the healthy rebelliousness against authority in his answers to questions, to be 85.

But now that "Encounters" has been completed, it can be seen as giving meaning to the passage of decades. These pieces serve for Kraft the way the string quartet did for Beethoven or Shostakovich, as a kind of autobiography in chamber music. Each is a personal work in which the percussion part serves as Kraft's alter ego encountering some other musical being. In every case, the traditional instrument is the one that ultimately seems a little strange.

Monday's program contained two of the earliest in the series and the two latest. "Encounters IV" is subtitled "Duel for Trombone and Percussion," and it is just that. It was written in 1972, during protests against the Vietnam War, and the score begins with the trombone softly calling out in Morse code, "Make war to make peace." Timpani respond to him, softly tapping back. Twenty minutes later, the trombonist, having tried everything under the sun to take on increasingly colorful and untamed noise makers, ties a white flag to his instrument and walks offstage in defeat.

If I am reading the symbolism correctly, this is an inventively subversive work. A lone trombone represents the honking war machine, single-minded in voice, while the battery of untamed sounds from percussion is the powerful voice of the crowd, the antiwar protesters. The performance by Bill Booth, theatrical with his trombone, and Alfredo Bringas was a knockout.

"Encounters V," from 1976, takes its subtitle, "In the Morning of the Winter Sea," from a poem by Carl A. Faber, who was Kraft's therapist. For cello and percussion, it was written during a difficult time in Kraft's life, he said, and the music rarely settles down. A storm begins brewing in high harmonics from both parties. Agitation is the music's main character, rarely settling down -- even the quiet pealing of bells can feel as disconcerting as thunder. This was another outstanding performance, with Peter Jacobson the fluent cellist and Ricardo Gallardo the equally and ideally fluent percussionist.

Lynn Vartan served as percussionist in the two recent "Encounters." In these works, the percussionist no longer wins, yet Vartan proved herself to be a commander of color, of which there is a riot. Kraft may have mellowed, but he hasn't lost his, you might say, pluck.

"Encounters XIV" had its premiere on Martha's Vineyard two summers ago. Called "Concerto a Tre," it joins violin and piano to a fun house of percussion and is essentially lyrical. The piano part, played by Ming Tsu, has a sophisticated jazz quality, cool and Bill Evans-ish. The violin is expected to be another percussion instrument, whether squealing or sweetly twanged, and Shalini Vijayan complied nicely.

The final "Encounter" is the most lyrical. It was written for John Schneider and Vartan. Schneider used a standard guitar and a "prepared one." The latter had alligator clips attached to the strings to produce a metallic effect, and both guitars were lightly amplified.

The percussion contingent was large and included a marimba, vibes and any number of gongs. But the sound of bells predominated. In five short sections, Kraft flits between delicate melody and jazzy drumming, with deeply affecting ease. "Encounters XV" is a delight. And the whole set, which will be recorded for release as a three-CD set next year, is a monument both to Kraft and to the world of percussion. (Copyright Los Angeles Times)

   

William Kraft paints with percussion.

To me, though, the 84-year-old dean of Los Angeles composers and former L.A. Philharmonic percussionist -- feisty as ever and currently being celebrated by Southwest Chamber Music in the first complete survey of his "Encounters" series -- is an out-and-out musical Abstract Expressionist. Monday night in the Colburn School's Zipper Hall, five late works in this sequence of percussion pieces were given, including the premiere of "Encounters XIII." Sonic action painting it all was.


In most of these works, an alien instrument or instruments "encounters" percussion, which usually takes the form of a vast, alluring battery. An encounter, Kraft said in one of his lighthearted introductions from the stage, implies warfare, and he has shamelessly rigged matters so that the percussion always wins.

If the first piece on the program, "Encounters X: Duologue for Violin and Marimba," was the least physically active because it uses but a single percussion instrument -- the marimba. Agitated violin lines are picked up by agitated percussion lines and thrown back and forth, as wood meets wood.

"Encounters IX," for alto saxophone and percussion, attracts through resonance. Moody, chromatic saxophone lines are made to linger when the alto's tone is enhanced by gongs and, later, restless, rustling snares. Tone colors bend in the wind.

Heaven enters the picture in "Encounters XII." A harp is the outsider trying to maintain an ethereal calm while subjected to erratic, aggressive drums and other explosive devices. Drum blasts are followed by sweetly pastoral cowbells, as if a minefield were being evoked, all while the harp floats on the wings of weightless glissandi.

The earliest of the evening's "Encounters" was the eighth. Playing this piece written in 1978 for solo percussionist and a great many instruments, Lynn Vartan -- who was also the commanding performer in the violin and sax "Encounters" -- was in motion for 16 minutes. She began with heraldic ringing and ended quietly. In between, she was the model of a musical action painter.

The new "Encounters XIII" is for wind quintet and percussion. In a discussion before the premiere, Kraft and Jeff von der Schmidt, who conducted, agreed on their dislike of the sound of combined flute, oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon. But that is what percussionist Ken McGrath, who commissioned the score, wanted. And given that McGrath saved up for 20 years to be able to afford the commission, a wind quintet is what he got.

He also got a small masterpiece. Kraft took the wind quintet as a challenge. The five instruments rarely play together, so he could deal with their individual palettes more easily. He was also extravagant with his instrumentation, which includes contrabassoon, bass clarinet and piccolo among the winds.

The score lasts not quite nine minutes. And if Kraft wants to call it American Impressionism, he can. The color fields are exceptionally subtle. Cymbals pick up shimmering wind harmonics. The ominous buzz of the contrabassoon seems to magically slow down when underscored by the percussionist's tom-tom-tom.This "Encounter" is an encounter with Kraft's past as well. As a kid in San Diego, he fell for percussion listening to the high hat of Count Basie's drummer, Jo Jones. Jones' high-hat style makes an appearance as the fade-out of "Encounter XIII," which Kraft described as "sins of my continuing youth" -- not a bad subtitle for the piece or the series

   

Speaking about his "Encounters" series from the Zipper Concert Hall stage Monday night, composer William Kraft explained that "one theory guiding these pieces is that percussion wins." Indeed, over the course of six "Encounters" pieces dating from the '60s and '70s and presented in Southwest Chamber Music's season opener, percussion of shifting colors and functions commanded the spotlight with bravado and poetry. It won.

Percussion music came of age during the 20th century, and Kraft had a stake in that process. His illustrious history includes years as a percussionist in the Los Angeles Philharmonic, as a composer of international repute and as a musical spark plug who started the Phil's New Music Group in the '80s.

Southwest Chamber is taking its "Encounters" project seriously. The concert series is set to continue in March with a new commission. A recording is planned for release on Kraft's 85th birthday next September. Like those in the audience, Kraft seemed ebullient Monday at the opportunity to experience several "Encounters" in a concentrated evening, passionately played. Heard together, the works engage in dialogue - comparing, contrasting and cross-talking.

Kraft's playful medieval battle game plan of "Encounters III: Duel for Trumpet and Percussion" (with percussionist Lynn Vartan and trumpeter Tony Ellis in friction and accord) contrasts with the pacifist aura, with texts including passages from the Bible and Longfellow, of "Encounters VII: Blessed Are the Peacemakers: For They Shall Be Called the Children of God, for Speaker and Two Percussionists." In the latter, John Schneider lent his warm, clear voice as narrator, and percussionists Vartan and Miguel Gonzalez moved between atmospherics and tight unisons.

Kraft belongs to the elite group of composers combining the serialist and the sensualist. The solo tuba tour de force of "Encounters II" - commissioned by Roger Bob and played beautifully Monday by Zach Collins - ventures into extremes of range and dynamics, enlivening the "atonal" writing.

The concert at the Colburn School hall in L.A. opened with "Soliloquy: Encounters I for Solo Percussion and Tape," and Ricardo Gallardo supplied proper virtuosity and subtlety. Closing the concert boldly, Vartan was the vibrant soloist on pitch-altering roto-toms in "Concertino for Roto-Toms & Percussion Quartet." The fine Mexico City-based ensemble Tambuco acted as a roving, supportive quartet.

That wild and yet sonically effective instrumentation points to the creative character and taste for reinvention embedded in the Kraft aesthetic. While well grounded in 20th century compositional vocabulary, he also has felt free and confident enough to make things up as goes along, like any good Modernist.

   

Among other ideas and projects, Southwest Chamber Music has come up with a new one that definitely hits home- “The Music of Paradise: Los Angeles From 1915 to 1964.”

Not a festival or a one-off concert, this is designed to be a series of retrospectives of music made by local hands that will pop up in spots during the next few seasons. Fittingly, the cutoff point is the year in which the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion opened, when musical Los Angeles allegedly came of age in the eyes of the world east of San Bernardino.

Southwest Chamber Music could have launched its bright idea Monday night at the Colburn School’s Zipper Hall with a clutch of such celebrated names as Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Kornglold, Krenek, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, even Cage. That would have been the easy road. Instead, we were treated to rare hearings of string quartets by some relatively out-of-fashion figures: William Grant Still, Elinor Remick Warren and Eric Zeisl.

Their backgrounds may have been diverse=- an African American who also wrote for big bands, a woman who led a dual existence as composer and housewife-mother, and a Jewish émigré from Vienna. Yet from the evidence here, they all shared an unwavering, unapologetic faith in old-fashioned Romantic tonality at a time when it was intellectually incorrect to think that way.

Still was represented by his “Danzas de Panama,” apparently a breakthrough in its time, yet a piece whose catchy tunes, lush interludes and Latin flavors and chord schemes seem rather tame today.

Warren’s Sonnets for Soprano and String Quartet, one of her handful of chamber works, sets four sonnets by Edna St. Vincent Millay in a flowing, ripened musical language that gives the impression of contentment, though darkening slightly in the Sonnet No. 35. Soprano Elissa Johnston’s timbre evoked a bright-eyed sense of wonder- which sounded right for this music.

Within the conventional, well-crafted four-movement structure of Zeisl’s String Quartet No. 2 lurks a stimulating collection of fugues, folk-like tunes and faint klezmer strains. Yet the most gripping section of this piece is the unusual slow movement, where an emotionally affecting prayer played steadily over an ostinato backing. Here is a work that ought to be heard more often.

Perhaps the performances by violinists Lorenz Gamma and Shalini Vijayan, violist Jan Carlin and cellist Peter Jacobson would have benefited from more rhythmic vitality- certainly the Still and parts of the Zeisl. But the basic warmth was present- and the Zipper’s burnished-wood acoustics took it from there.

   

On paper, the worlds of Debussy and Toru Takemitsu appear separated by time and culture. The French impressionist composer died in 1918, and the famed Japanese composer lived from 1930 to 1996, but connections of style, approach and handling of space and color connect the two, not to mention a reciprocal gaze from west to east and back in their music.

That theme, of composers connecting across history and cultural distance, underscored the Southwest Chamber Music concert Sunday in Pasadena’s Boston Court. The intelligent and vibrant chamber music ensemble is celebrating its 20th anniversary season and has a habit of doing the right things.

For a chamber encounter of this delicacy, the acoustically warm but crisp Branson room at Boston Court proved ideal. The musicians- flutist Lisa Edelstein (replacing regular Lawrence Kaplan), violist Jan Carlin, the agile and luminous harpist Amy Wilkins and double bassist Tom Peters- captured the requisite spirits of the music.

For Peters, that spirit had a more avant-garde leaning than the other music on the bill, as he worked with the engaging challenges of two pieces by Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, whose work was influenced by John Cage.“Stanzas” is an aleatoric, Cage-ian piece, an abstract assembly of tones and extended techniques but, as with Cage’s music, also contemplative. Ichiyanagi’s “Generation of Spaces,” by contrast, is through-composed. It also has an improvisational air but settles into a softly driving rhythm. Peters handled the music masterfully.

This concert’s anchor was Takemitsu’s “And then I knew ‘twas wind,” a trio for flute, viola and harp from 1992 partly inspired by the instrumentation and notes of Debussy’s Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp, which closed the program in a happy heap of sonorities.

More subtly, Takemitsu’s music was miraculous for its ability to appeal to head and heart, amid sterner stuff of 20th century serious musical discourse. Similarly, Debussy’s music sets itself apart form late romanticism and early modernism by being both beautiful and smart.

Such an operative duality was felt in Takemitsu’s “Air for Solo Flute,” the final piece he completed, in 1995. Edelstein nicely conveyed the work’s mating of serenity and tension, in the harmonic palette and sense of structure. A morphing four-note motif is the last thing we hear, and it lingers in the mind.

“Toward the Sea III,” performed by Edelstein and Wilkins, is a programmatic piece, evoking sea-related imagery, and sensations- sea spray, cresting waves and the lulls between, a vast expanse beyond the shore.

In this context, Debussy, whose Sonata was performed last, was the “straight man” of the program, but his increasing adventurism in 1915- while battling the cancer that would kill him- blended with his natural lyricism. It sounded hopeful and probing and moving, nearly a century later.

   

With its Summer Festival at The Huntington, Southwest Chamber Music moves its intimate concerts outdoors, to an ethereal garden setting. Imagine notes from Mozart’s “Quartet for Flute and Strings” set free like butterflies among the camellias and palm trees of The Huntington Gardens.

For the 13th annual festival, Artistic Director and Conductor Jeff von der Schmidt has scheduled plenty of Mozart in celebration of his 250th birthday. But von der Schmidt has also included more contemporary selections: an emotional work by Eric Zeisl, who fled Vienna during the second World War and had a successful composing career in Hollywood; a masterpiece written by James Newton of the Luckman Jazz Orchestra and dedicated to Winnie Mandela; and a piece about spring rain by Chen Yi, an up-and-coming young composer from China working in the United States.

Embracing the diversity of new music being composed throughout the world, while respecting the tradition of European music, has been part of Southwest Chamber Music’s unique focus. Southwest Chamber Music’s current season is called “Expanding Horizons” in recognition of its continuing mission to create multicultural programs that reflect the diversity of its audiences.

“I believe that one of the most important things to do with classical music is to integrate the world around us into its core repertoire,” said von der Schmidt who co-founded Southwest Chamber Music with his wife Jan Karlin 19 years ago. “These expanding horizons have helped us look at the potential audiences of Southern California as unlimited.”

“We tend to be this huge sponge of a culture,” von der Schmidt said about Southern California. “I find that inclusive programming is very, very interesting and widely accepted. I want to change it from accepted to expected.”

While Southwest Chamber Music’s diverse programming might have seemed like an artistic risk, it has definitely paid off. This year the ensemble will move from The Huntington Art Gallery loggia, which will be under construction, to the garden terrace next to Friends Hall, increasing the number of tickets they can sell. And filling those additional seats won’t be a challenge.

“For over a decade now, we’ve been selling these concerts out,” von der Schmidt said. “By and large, people have enjoyed meeting and hearing from composers of their own time.”

In further testament to its success in promoting cultural diversity in music, Southwest Chamber Music has a 12 CD set of music from its “Composer Portrait Series,” featuring works premiered or commissioned by the ensemble in its first decade. Cambodian-American composer Chinary Ung, who teaches at the University of California, San Diego, was the focus of this year’s series. That collaboration will take Southwest Chamber Music to Cambodia and Vietnam to perform concerts and educate students. The Vienna-trained von der Schmidt said that Southwest Chamber musicians will be “the first Americans in residence at the Hanoi National Conservatory since the end of the Vietnam War.”

Perhaps Southwest Chamber Music’s greatest success has been its multi-year project aimed at recording, for the first time, all of famous Mexican composer Carlos Chávez’s chamber music.

The first three volumes of the “Complete Chamber Music of Carlos Chávez” earned four Grammy nominations in three consecutive years. The final CD is due out this summer. Southwest Chamber Music won 2003 and 2004 Grammy Awards for “Best Small Ensemble” for volumes one and two. Volume three, which was recorded in Los Angeles with the Mexico-city based Tambuco Percussion Ensemble, received 2005 nominations for “Best Small Ensemble” and “Best Classical Album.”

Though they didn’t bring home another Grammy this year, the experience has been instrumental in earning Southwest Chamber Music an international reputation and a lot of visibility.

“It’s completely changed who we are,” von der Schmidt said. “Some friends of mine in jazz said, ‘Well, you know you’re not a one-hit wonder.’ To have four nominations … puts us in the category of every international artist in the field, and this is something that’s supposed to be done by budgets in the millions, not in the thousands like ours. This is like a small independent film that was nominated for ‘Best Picture’ at the Academy Awards.”

Von der Schmidt humbly attributes the success of the project to a heightened atmosphere of cultural sensitivity.

“I think it was the right project at the right time,” he said. “Everyone is becoming more and more aware of the Latin influence in our own country, and that influence translated into votes for our project at the Grammys.”

But von der Schmidt also selected Chávez’s works for a personal reason.

“I grew up in Monterey Park, and the family that took care of me was from La Paz in Ensenada,” he said. “And during the 1960s, Columbia Records had issued a series of recordings with Carlos Chávez conducting the National Symphony in Mexico City of all six of his symphonies. And those records became the soundtrack of my childhood. I would wait for my parents to pick me up from work in these friends’ homes from Mexico, and Chávez would always be on in the background.”

Southwest Chamber Music percussionist Lynn Vartan, who performed with the Tambuco Percussion Ensemble on the third CD, was especially pleased that percussion music in particular received that level of recognition. Vartan, who will also play the marimba for James Newton’s piece on August 11 and 12, said the project was a unique experience.

“In the world of percussion, Tambuco is incredibly well-known,” Vartan said, “and the music that we did, the music of Carlos Chávez, is also incredibly well-known. The two pieces in particular, ‘Tocada’ and ‘Tambuco,’ the name of the piece for which the ensemble was named, are two landmark percussion pieces in our sort of historic repertoire, which of course doesn’t date back that far; percussion ensemble is rather new. So those pieces are some of the first pieces written for percussion ensemble. It was really amazing to have the chance to record these pieces with a Mexican percussion ensemble that is so steeped in the history of this composer, and was in fact named after that composer’s piece. And the sessions, we just had so much fun, I can’t even tell you.”

Southwest Chamber Music’s partnership with the Tambuco Percussion Ensemble led to its being invited to Universidad Autónoma de México in Mexico City to perform all the works in a five-concert series.

“[It] is unprecedented for an American ensemble to get an invitation like that,” von der Schmidt said.

As Southwest Chamber Music heads toward its 20th anniversary season, it continues to broaden its horizons and audiences not only with its concerts and recordings but also with its educational programs. Project Muse brings concerts to six schools in the Pasadena and Los Angeles Unified School Districts. The Mentorship Program provides middle and high school students with weekly lessons. Still another program that reaches out to children who might not otherwise have the opportunity to hear classical music is Music Unwrapped, which features family concerts at the Colburn School for Performing Arts.

So, if you haven’t yet heard the Grammy-winning Southwest Chamber Music play at one of the regular season concerts at the Norton Simon Museum or the Colburn School or at the special “Blendings: Wine and Music” events at the Armory Center for the Arts, the Summer Festival might be the ideal time.

Perhaps unconsciously using an analogy fitting with “Blendings,” von der Schmidt said, “I think we’re like wine makers where now the wine’s really good. You know, it takes a while to get all the vintages and wine to mature and the grapes to mature, and I think it’s just been quite a ride.”

   

Louis XIV had Versailles. Residents of Los Angeles have the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

The Huntington is made even more magical during the Southwest Chamber Music’s summer season. The ensemble, which won two Grammy Awards in 2004 and marks its 20 th anniversary next year, has performed for more than half of its history on the grounds of the sumptuous San Marino estate.

Due to the renovation of the venue’s Art Gallery and Loggia, home to Gainsborough’s famed “Blue Boy” and “Pinkie,” this year’s concerts, July 7-Aug. 26, take place at the Garden Terrace. Pre-concert talks are new, too. And this being the 250 th anniversary of the birth of Mozart, founder and artistic director Jeff von der Schmidt has scheduled works by the composer on each of the four programs.

“Mozart,” the conductor points out, “is one of those rare people like Shakespeare or Michelangelo, where the relationship of the quality and emotional content of the work is relevant no matter how much time passes. There’s nothing more fun,” he add, “than leaving the concert with Mozart ringing in your ears. It tends to revive everybody’s spirits.”

Von der Schmidt, 50, also believes in mixing things up. The summer programs span centuries and genres, showcasing music of Bach, Ravel, Manuel de Falla and two locals: Eric Zeisl, a Viennese composer who left Austria for West Hollywood as World War II loomed, and James Newton, whose piece “Violet” is dedicated to Winnie Mandela.

“We don’t shy away from doing diverse repertory and new work,” Von der Schmidt says. “James and I are also good friends. We’ve done three of his pieces so far and have commissioned him to write a mass next year for our 20 th anniversary.”

The season finale features Mozart’s Quartet for Piano and Strings alongside Chen Yi’s “Happy Rain in Spring Night,” an aural painting that blends Chinese and Western musical techniques.

Hearing such music amid the Huntington’s bucolic landscapes is one of this city’s uncontested pleasures. “Lighting is everything, and for me, it’s the transition from twilight to darkness,” says Von der Schmidt. “Monet would stand and look at the sunlight change all day long. For audiences [at the Huntington] it can also be a bird calling in the distance or incredible moonrises during the performances. It’s really a special place.”

The Huntington, 1150 Oxford Road, San Marino, 626.405.2141.

Southwest Chamber Music, 800.726.7147.

   

I had the opportunity to hear the Southwest Chamber Music’s closing concert in their "Expanding Horizons" season at the Norton Simon Museum, Saturday evening, April 22nd at 8 PM. The program was structured in the same concentric circles as the central work, The Great Procession by Charles Wuorinen, framed on either side by works of Mozart.

The popular Quartet in D Major for Flute and Strings by Mozart opened the program with grace and lyrical beauty. Lawrence Kaplan’s sweet tone soared above the strings: Lorenz Gamma, violin, Jan Karlin, viola, and Peter Jacobson, cello. In the slow movement, the pizzicato accompaniment was perfectly synchronized, moving seamlessly into the Rondeau Finale. Each repetition of the lively rondeau main theme was elegantly prepared.

The central work, The Great Procession by American composer Charles Wuorinen, is the second of three ballets commissioned by Peter Martins for the New York City Ballet, based on Dante’s Divine Comedy. This ballet music depicts the journey through Purgatory and, like Dante’s masterpiece, is constructed in concentric circles. The central movement, The Griffin, is lyrical and melancholy, the eye in the center of the storm. On either side of the Griffin is a recurring Refrain, brief and with a distinct, percussive motive in the piano. Continuing to work outwards from the center, The Chariot and The Seven Virtues, on either side of the refrains, are companion pieces; The Chariot is in compound meter, the Seven Virtues, fittingly in 7, or 4 + 3, and both movements have a lilting, almost dance-like quality to them. The Elders and The Departure are the next pair of companion pieces; both movements are slow, The Elders has the quality of one dragging a great weight, The Departure is in a slow 6. The Refrain then frames these two movements, taking the second and second to last places in the set. The opening movement, The Seven Lights, depicts the tortuous upward climb; the closing movement, The Unveiling, is the quickest of the movements, with constantly shifting meters. The ensemble, Lawrence Kaplan (flute/piccolo), Jim Foschia (clarinet/bass clarinet), Lorenz Gamma, Peter Jacobson, Lynn Vartan (percussion), and Ming Tsu on piano, were conducted by Jeff von der Schmidt. Kudos to the Southwest Chamber Music for their interpretation of this work, for making the architecture of the piece audible to me, a first-time listener.

The program concluded with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 12 in A major, arranged by the composer for piano and string quartet. Ming Tsu was the featured soloist, joined by Lorenz Gamma and Lisa Dondlinger on violins, Jan Karlin on viola, and Peter Jacobson on cello. The chamber ensemble gave the concerto an intimacy to the music, a charming conclusion to both the program and the season. Ming Tsu sparkled her way through the scale passagework, the conventional trills ending each cadenza. While the concerto is quite conventional in form, there were a few startling moments only the young Mozart could incorporate: a surprising recapitulation in the first movement after a series of sequences in minor keys; a playful last movement in which the piano enters with a new theme rather than restating the main theme.

Be sure not to miss this 2-time Grammy Award winning ensemble this summer in their summer series at the Hunting Library. Visit their website at www.swmusic.org for more information, or call 800 726 7147.

   

Southwest Chamber Music proudly turns 20 next year. It champions new music and local music avidly and intelligently. It reaches out to its community, notably in its meaningful education programs. And honors accrue. The ensemble boasts Grammys for the first two volumes of its worthwhile series of Mexican composer Carlos Chávez’s neglected chamber music. Volume 3 has been nominated for two more, including best classical recording.

But Southwest Chamber Music received a rather bigger and more lasting prize Saturday night at the Norton Simon Museum. For this, the last of its Composer Portraits series concerts – this year devoted to Chinary Ung – it commissioned a major new work. “Aura” lasted 36 riveting minutes and will expand to 40 in a version being prepared for the fall. Why not make it 50 or 60 minutes? With music this enthralling, there is no need to hold back.

Ung is a pioneer. Born in Cambodia in 1942, he left his war-torn country in 1964 to study clarinet (the only instrument available to him in Phnom Penh) in New York. Teaching at Northern Illinois University, Connecticut College, the University of Pennsylvania and Arizona State University, he spent many years completely cut off from Cambodia. News of the slaughter and starvation of several in his family was slow to reach him. Until recently, Ung refused to return to his homeland, maintaining his connection with Cambodian culture through his work. It is no longer uncommon that East meets West in music, and Ung was hardly the first Asian or Western composer to make the connections.

Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison came first (as, for that matter, did Debussy). Toru Takemitsu was on the case from Japan, Ravi Shankar from India. In the 1950s, the late Nam June Paik found that when he mixed his native Korean music with Shoenberg, he got an explosive reaction that led to topless cello concerts and video art.

But Ung – who has been at UC San Diego since 1995 and who won the Grawemeyer Award, composition’s most prestigious prize, for his orchestral piece “Inner Voices” in 1989 – worked with more exotic material than most. Unlike the gamelan music of Indonesia or the gagaku of imperial Japan, Cambodian music has had little international exposure.

Even now, most of us know it through Ung’s filter. In his sleight of hand, Western instruments becomes Eastern while never losing their personalities. It’s the smoothness of the style, I think, that first draws one in Ung explains Khmer culture, in which the gongs and drums and the wailing winds insinuate themselves into life, using our language. But he has also held back, realizing we may not be ready for the raw, ecstatic deal.

In “Aura” – which is written for two sopranos and 10-member ensemble of woodwinds, strings and percussion – Ung has gotten past the longing for his own past. Expression is now direct and open. He will never lose sensual beauty (all his music is gorgeous), but there is more. In one section, titled “Rain of Tears,” he expresses he universal sorrow of awe-inspiring floods, where New Orleans or Band Aceh, through chilling, clotted string melodies and the eerie whistling of the singers.

Awe, though, is awe, and that is the higher aspiration of “Aura” The sopranos sing choppy text in many languages, but the Cambodian term for the Buddha’s aura, chaw pean raingsei, is the one that stands out. Musically, the piece unfolds like radiating light. As the aura is unveiled, the singers bow finger cymbals, the percussionist bows a vibraphone, the strings play piercing high harmonics, everyone who can whistles, and all is aglow.

A dazzling high soprano part was elatedly sung by Elissa Johnston. Kathleen Roland contrasted with a darker soprano. Southwest’s artistic director Jeff von der Schmidt, conducted with conviction.

   

When it comes to recognition, the ensemble known as Southwest Chamber Music is an anomaly: It has won two recent Grammy Awards but many have never heard of it.

Still, that hasn't stopped the 19-year-old group from continuing its prolific and diverse work. And this week's Zipper Hall performance at the Colburn School of Performing Arts is no exception.

In many ways, the Nov. 15 concert is a template for the Southwest brand. The repertory-driven ensemble is basically built around flute, clarinet, string quartet, piano and percussion, with conductor and Artistic Director Jeffrey Von der Schmidt adding or subtracting players as he needs. Diversity of repertoire, especially in the last few years, has become a hallmark.

This week's program is about autumn, and specifically, the cities of Kyoto, Boston and Vienna in the fall. The highlight is Kaija Saariho's Six Japanese Gardens, about the Finnish composer's trip to Kyoto. She recorded sounds of Buddhist monks, percussion from several temples, and with those elements weaved in, Southwest's percussionist, Lynn Vartan, performs on various temple bells.

Von der Schmidt is a big proponent of female composers. "I just think that it's important to redefine the music, or we lose it, and that in particular, women are critical," he said. He also mentions the idea of diverse composers in the context of Southwest's weekly music education programs in the Los Angeles and Pasadena Unified School Districts. "It says an awful lot to our high school students that are female. That's where it really becomes powerful."

The evening's program also includes the sigh-filled, sometimes melancholy Clarinet Quintet by Johannes Brahms, and the tough, neo-classic Quintet for Flute and Strings piece by American composer Walter Piston. "It works in a Norman Rockwell world of New England kind of way, of forthrightness and energy," Von der Schmidt said.

Southwest has played Zipper Hall since Colburn opened in 1998. (Von der Schmidt, who had founded Southwest nine years prior, was a Colburn teacher.) The ensemble played its first shows at the Pasadena Presbyterian Church, and later at venues all over Southern California, including Mt. Washington's Southwest Museum, from which it takes its name.

Now the group performs half its shows Downtown, and half in Pasadena; the season runs through April. There is also a regularly scheduled open rehearsal series at the Armory Center for the Arts in Old Pasadena, where patrons drink wine and sit in on what's designed as a behind-the-scenes sort of musical experience.

Of his audiences, compared to that of other chamber music ensembles, Von der Schmidt says, "it's more adventurous, it's absolutely hipper and they expect something new.

"We do an audience survey, and doing new things wins by over 50%," he continued. "We don't get, 'Just stick to Mozart please.' L.A. is the greatest city in the world in terms of people going to see things, but you're going to have to get it past dead European white guys, to get it past here."

More than concert attendance and website hits, though both are on the rise, Von der Schmidt says the Grammys give one of the country's hardest working chamber music ensembles a little recognition. The group won for Best Small Ensemble Performance in 2003 and 2004 for recordings of Mexican composer Carlos Chávez's complete chamber music.

"You get your phone calls returned," Von der Schmidt said. "It also stamps your artistic passport, so you can go anywhere."

Southwest is the first American ensemble to glean an invite from the Vietnamese Hanoi National Conservancy of Music, and Von der Schmidt is securing funding for what the ensemble is calling its Southeast Asia Initiative. In this, the ensemble would host, and be hosted by, groups in Vietnam and Cambodia, the first such exchange for an American group since the 1970s.

Though funding didn't come together for a February departure date, Von der Schmidt said he is confident he'll secure it soon. Southwest is also in talks for appearances at UNAM (National Autonomous University in Mexico City) and the Gmunden Festival in Austria.

"These things have all come to us recently," Von der Schmidt said. "We were invited places before, but not at these levels. If you show up everyday and stick to the path, doors open. That's for sure."

Southwest Chamber Music plays Nov. 15, 8 p.m., at the Colburn School of Performing Arts, 200 S. Grand Ave., (800) 726-7147 or swmusic.org.

Contact Kristin Friedrich at kristin@downtownnews.com.

   

What a delight it was to attend the final concert of the Southwest Chamber Music’s Summer Festival at the Huntington on Sunday evening, August 21. The Gallery Loggia at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens provides the ideal setting for intimate chamber music on a cool summer evening.

I admire and appreciate Artistic Director, Jeff von der Schmidt’s, ability to craft beautifully balanced programs. Two Mozart works mirrored the pillars of the Loggia, framing a contemporary work by Cambodian composer, Chinary Ung. As though ushered into the evening by a familiar, treasured friend, the program opened with the enchanting Quartet in D major for Flute and Strings, K. 285, by Mozart. Lawrence Kaplan, flute, Lorenz Gamma, violin, Jan Karlin, viola, and Peter Jacobson, cello, comprised the first ensemble. Kaplan’s tone was warm and lyrical; Jacobson performed with his signature joy and abandon, and the ensemble elegantly prepared key thematic moments, such as the recapitulation in the first movement, and the recurrences of the rondo material in the final movement. The pizzicato accompaniment to the Adagio movement was gracefully shaped to support Kaplan’s floating legato line.

We had the honor of Chinary Ung’s presence for the performance of Oracle, commissioned by the Da Capo Chamber Players and premiered in 2004. The composer presented some background to the work, inspired by the Dali Lama’s visits to an Oracle for guidance about whether or not to leave his homeland of Tibet. I confess I felt apprehensive about listening to a work based on a subject so foreign to me, but as I consciously decided to set aside my fears, I discovered that Ung's music spoke with a universal power. I experienced the human progression of anguish over a difficult decision, the turmoil of seeking out advice and weighing the outcome, the struggle to find a solution, and the final resignation to the inevitable, the peace that comes with acceptance of what must be. The instrumentalists, which included Lawrence Kaplan on piccolo/flute/alto flute, Jim Foschia on clarinet/bass clarinet, Shalini Vijayan on violin, Peter Jacobson on cello, Lynn Vartan on percussion, and Tom Peters on electronics, were asked to employ their voices in various phonemes. The timbre of the voices blended in a haunting way with the sonorities of the instruments. Jeff von der Schmidt effectively conducted the ensemble. The audience responded enthusiastically to the piece.

After intermission, a less-familiar work by Mozart, the Quintet in A major for Clarinet and Strings, K 581, concluded the concert. Jim Foschia on clarinet joined Lorenz Gamma, Shalini Vijayan, Jan Karlin and Peter Jacobson in this final ensemble. I have never heard Foschia play better: his shadings of tonal color, the perfectly executed detached arpeggios of the development section, and the preparation of the recapitulation made the opening movement elegant and charming. The lyrical slow movement had an exquisite thematic partnering of the clarinet and first violin. The sophisticated Menuetto seemed to have rondo sections framing the central Trio in a minor key, the clarinet and violin aptly trading prominence in the ensemble. The final movement was a set of variations, successively showcasing each instrument in the ensemble. What a pleasure to hear an ensemble so equally matched.

I encourage our readers to investigate the 2005-2006 season of the Southwest Chamber Music, "Expanding Horizons." This capable ensemble will take you on an adventurous discovery of new music – new music that is contemporary, and music that is new because it is seldom heard. Call (800) 726-7147 or visit www.swmusic.org for information.

   

If Southwest Chamber Music can raise the money, next year it will be the first U.S. group to participate in cultural exchanges with Vietnam since the Vietnam War ended in 1975 and with Cambodia since the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979.

"We don't have all the funding secured," Southwest artistic director Jeff von der Schmidt said this month. "But we do think it will happen. We're working very hard with various foundations, businesses and the governments involved. Should we not get it together for February 2006, we'll keep working at it until it does happen."

The three-year project would cost about half a million dollars, with a first-year price tag of $150,000, according to Von der Schmidt. The first year, the Pasadena-based chamber group would take programs of music by Cambodian American composer Chinary Ung to both countries. Ung won the $150,000 Grawemeyer Award for Music in 1989 and has taught at UC San Diego since 1995.

The second year, students from the Vietnamese and Cambodian capitals, Hanoi and Phnom Penh, would come to the U.S. for coaching and workshops. The third, Southwest would present a festival of American music in both countries.

The Vietnam connection came about through serendipity. Southwest hired as its communications director Thu Nga Dan, a pianist trained at the Conservatory of Music of Montreal and at USC and it turns out the daughter of Thu Ha Tran, director of the Hanoi National Conservatory of Music. (Dan's grandmother, Lien Thi Thai, cofounded the conservatory in 1956 and headed the piano department.)

Dan made the connections, and Tran came to Pasadena in July to extend the invitation to Southwest in person.

"This is the very first time that a foreign group has shown interest in having a residency a long-term project in Vietnam, not just performing and giving master classes and going," Tran said by phone with her daughter as the translator. "They really want to have an interaction. It's an honor for the conservatory to interact with musicians of such a high caliber, as proved by the two Grammys Southwest has won."

For Ung, the project is personal. Born in Cambodia in 1942, he came to the United States in 1964 to study at the Manhattan School of Music and Columbia University. When Pol Pot took power in Cambodia in 1975, however, he stopped composing, worried about what was happening to his country and his relatives there.

In 1980, a year after Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were defeated by the Vietnamese, Ung learned that half his family members had perished under the regime.

Shocked and also deeply concerned about the survival of traditional Khmer culture, which the Khmer Rouge had attempted to eradicate, he devoted himself for nearly a decade to the study of Cambodian music and aesthetics.

That also changed his way of composing. When he came to the U.S. to study, he applied himself to learning the 12-tone school prevalent in academic circles, even though, he told The Times in 1997, he didn't feel temperamentally attuned to it.

Now, however, he felt an urgency to connect with his country's musical roots. He broke his five-year silence in 1980 with a solo cello piece, "Khse Buon," in which he began to bridge Western serialism and Eastern scales and methods.

But it was with "Inner Voices," a large-scale work commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra and composed in 1986, that Ung established his new voice. He gained international recognition when the work won the Grawemeyer Award in 1989. (There's a five-year window of eligibility for the honor.)

Ung went back to Cambodia for the first time in 2003. "After 40 years or so, I was touched by the amount of talent that those young students have, and at the same time, I have seen their lack of real solid instrumental training," he said from Connecticut, where he was vacationing.

"I don't think I'm really unique or special. Compared with the Cambodian youth now, I was lucky to be placed with the right teacher, at the right time. There are a number of them already interested if there will be opportunities that could open up for them."

Creativity within tradition

UNG sees the Southwest project as one of those opportunities a way to help young musicians get instrumental training and to help young composers get acquainted with newer Western music.

"The country has been successfully retraining youngsters in preserving their own culture, but at the same time, personally, I think they need to open up to new creativity," he said. "For centuries, their ancestors in Cambodia created new art forms constantly. This was nothing new. I want to encourage them to create, to innovate, without destroying their own culture."

Under the program, Ung would also go to Vietnam, despite the enmity that has long existed between the countries. "To be frank, throughout the centuries, Cambodia and Vietnam have been constantly at war over border problems, territory disputes and so forth," the composer said. "I hope this is a small opportunity that educationally, culturally, people should focus on the direction of exchange and expanding and really sorting out what is the truth."

Von der Schmidt, for his part, feels the project has the potential to help bridge a divide that for many still exists between the U.S. and Vietnam. "The Vietnamese recognize that the war closed a door for them creatively," he said. "They look at this as a way to reopen that door. When we were there discussing these possibilities, the Vietnamese openly embraced us as Americans.

"Vietnam, for us, has to change from being a war to being a country. I think this will happen. There is resolve and friendship on both sides."

   

When Antonin Dvorák came to the United States at the end of the 19th century, he was determined to show the fledgling American classical music community a thing or two about itself. Write music using American source material, he insisted, and that includes the spiritual and the music of Native Americans. He furthermore advocated opening up the mainly white male ranks to more women and African Americans.

Be yourself, Dvorák said, just do so in my language. Clothe your American tunes in European that is, Brahmsian or, better still, Dvorákian -- symphonies. Give the New World a "fresh" Old World character.

But it is not so simple anymore in a multicultural world. Dvorák was on the bill for the Southwest Chamber Music program at the Huntington Library Saturday night. So too was Joan Huang, a composer who was born in China in 1957 and immigrated to America 19 years ago. Two of her works for violin and percussion were sandwiched between two big Dvorák chamber pieces for strings from around 1875.

It was a lovely, warm evening, and the Huntington is a wonderful place for Southwest's summer series, which takes place on the loggia of the Art Gallery. This is intimate chamber music without a chamber. (There are also lawn seats on one of the better lawns in America.)

The Huntington is well suited for Dvorák; Arabella Huntington was a patron of the Czech composer. And his robust string music is in the same style as these lush surroundings. But Huang, who lives in Altadena, was the local composer Saturday. And many Chinese are now San Marino neighbors of the Huntington.

Huang's "The Legend of Chang-e" and "The Road of T'ao" were written for the Boston violin and percussion duo Marimolin in the mid-'90s, and they were here played by Shalini Vijayan, a vibrant violinist, and Lynn Vartan, an efficient percussionist.

Both works follow the opposite of Dvorák's procedures. Huang expresses her native music and concepts in a foreign, Western language. "Chang-e" describes the Chinese legend of a beautiful moon goddess and her heroic husband, trapped by the sun.

Day turned to night during this performance. Day had already given us a burning sun and the sultry evening was to present a mysteriously glowing moon. The music accompaniment to this transition was magical. Huang writes rapturously for violin with agitated bowing softening to sweet pentatonic scales. There is drama to each phrase, yet also a sense of oneness with the material. The accompanying marimba took a while to reach the violin's wavelength but did so as it followed the violin's harmonics on their ethereal ascent into the ether.

"The Road of T'ao" is harder work for the listener and certainly for the percussionist, who this time needs a battery of instruments, from vibes to bongos. Interestingly, Huang says in her notes that she takes her sense of the Tao from a Westerner, Alan Watts. Though the root of her culture, Taoism was discouraged during the Cultural Revolution of her youth.

The music reveals these conflicts, or at least the performance did. Again there is much compelling violin writing, but the percussion often seemed at odds. Perhaps Vartan tried too hard. But the violin was heard, and by the end its spirit once more soared.

The Dvorák a trio for two violins and viola in the first part of the concert, the well-known and robust Quintet in G Major for Strings, Opus 77 after intermission was comfort music. The first violinist, Lorenz Gamma, gave the works a more strident edge than might have been wished, but these were softened by the more flowing second violin of Vijayan in both pieces and the ingratiating lyricism of the cellist Sebastian Toettcher in the quintet. Jan Karlin was violist in both works; Tom Peters, the rock-solid bassist.

Southwest Chamber Music has had its ups and downs, performance-wise, over its 18 seasons. But it has always programmed creatively and internationally, and it is, in every way, more up than down these days.

It has won two Grammys in a row for CDs of the music of Carlos Chavez, but the just-released third volume is the best yet.

And let's hear it for the Huntington. At least one local museum still recognizes the value of sophisticated, timely chamber music.

   

If you live long enough, so the old saw goes, you can become an institution; and William Kraft, who turns 85 on September 6, suddently finds himself the dean of composers in Los Angeles (and possibly of the West Coast)

But the advancing years are a mere distraction for Kraft, who is always busy with some project or other. He's still composing up a storm from his handsome Altadena house overlooking Pasadena and continues to be curious about the latest developments in new music or the old developments that he missed the first time around, like those in jazz, his first love.


Up until last October, though, Kraft never witnessed an entire evening devoted to his music. So with his 85th birthday in mind, Southwest Chamber Music boldly stepped into the breach with not one but three all-Kraft concerts, the first complete cycly of his series of Encounters for percussion and other instruments. Kraft began writing Encounters back in 1966 for a new music series of the same name, and the idea just took on a life of its own. There are now 13 of them-an epic body of work comparable in scope to Luciano Berio's Sequenzas for solo instruments. And Kraft isn't through yet; he's working on a 14th for percussion and microtonal guitar.

The retrospective started last October in the Colburn School's Zipper Hall in Los Angeles with performances of Encounters I, II, III, VI, and VII, continued there in March with Encounters VIII, IX, X, XII, and the world premiere of XIII, and will conclude this fall (date as yet undertermined) with Encounters IV, V, XI and the world premiere of XIV

Not only that; Southwest Chamber Music is recording all of them for release sometime in 2009 on Cambria, which shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with this group's penchant for big-thinking recording projects (like the monumental 12-CD Composer Portrait Series box and the complete chamber music of Carlos Chavez.)

The Encounters are a wildly varied bunch. No two are alike; most push out the limits of how percussion instruments can be used as reasonable musical vehicles in confrontations with instruments of definite pitch. The candidly engaging Kraft says that percussion instruments are the least expressive of any in the orchestra; so, in order to overcome that limiation, he emphasized the element of color, the percussion family's biggest selling point. The onetime jazz drummer and former Los Angeles Philharmonic percussionist also adds, wickedly, "The encounter is fixed so the percussionist always wins."

The March 17 installment began with Encounters X, a mini-suite of brief highly varied jousts between violinist Shalini Vijayan and marimba player Lynn Vartan that were sometimes angular, sometimes chasing each other, concluding with a fascinating repeated pattern that resembled a stuck groove at the end of a record fading away. Kraft's jazz connection surfaced noticeably in Encounters IX for alto saxophone and percussion. Saxophonist Richard Mitchell was able to produce unmarked, soulful jazz inflections in each, with Vartan indulging in some of Kraft's favorite colors-bowed crotales and vibraphone keys.

Inspired by the harp writing of Toru Takemitsu, Encounters XII for harp (Alison Bjorkedal) and percussion (Ricardo Gallardo from Mexico's Tambuco Percussion Ensemble) was a pure coloristic mood piece with a somewhat Asian flavor, exploiting a huge variety of sounds ranging from delicate mallet work on cowbells to short, sharp shots. Encounters VIII was, you might say, a percussion ensemble piece for one player, the irrepressibly agile Vartan, with colorful battering on a variety of small gongs and cowbells and loud rolls on the full-sized gong announcing various sections.

Encounters XIII broke the mold again, for this work for standard wind quintet and percussion, completed only last October, dispensed with the usual massed sonorities for this fivesome. Instead, the quintet chattered away as individuals in imaginative new combinations, eventually settling on a dirge. The piece has a veledictory quality that made it fee like a last work, though it obviously isn'tl Like Shostakovich in his Symphony No. 15, Kraft reverts to a percussive vision of his youth at the end, a shuffle beat on the hi-hat cymbals that recalls Jo Johnes, Count Basic's uplifting drummer of the 1930s and 40s.

In general, the earlier Encounters heard in October were perhaps a bit more alluring than most of the later ones. Yet, when the two concerts combine in memory, Kraft can be seen as gradually evolving a style that he calls American impressionnism. The third concert should fill in the gaps and push forward from there. We should all be so engaged at 84! (Copyright American Record Guide)

   

When Southwest Chamber Music needed management advice for its musicians, it turned to the philosophy of legendary consultant Peter Drucker

As rockers, rappers, and country crooners scoop up their Grammy Awards this weekend, you can be certain that they'll thank all kinds of people for helping to make them stars: producers, agents, the fans and, of course, many a mom.

But there's one Grammy winner of years past that feels it owes a debt to a very different sort of influence: management guru Peter Drucker.

Pasadena (Calif.)-based Southwest Chamber Music has long drawn on Drucker's insights to help it manage the enterprise effectively, as well as to tailor its musical selections. By constantly questioning which programs and strategies have become obsolete, Southwest offers some valuable lessons that can help any organization—no matter what kind of business it's in—hit the right notes. "Reading Drucker became this incredible light bulb for me," says Jan Karlin, the executive director of Southwest, which snared Grammys in 2003 and 2004 for the first two volumes of the Complete Chamber Music of Carlos Chavez.

Verdi Influenced Drucker That an outfit such as Southwest would have a strong affinity for Drucker's work is not surprising, really. Drucker, who saw "management as a liberal art," peppered his books and articles with references to music. "The key to greatness" in any organization, Drucker wrote in a 2002 essay for Harvard Business Review, "is to look for people's potential and spend time developing it.…To build a world-class orchestra requires rehearsing the same passage in the symphony again and again until the first clarinet plays it the way the conductor hears it. This principle is also what makes a research director in an industry lab successful."

Notably, Drucker counted Giuseppe Verdi, the 19th-century Italian composer, as having a tremendous impact on him. In the late 1920s, Drucker lived in Hamburg, where he worked as a trainee at a cotton export firm. Every week, he'd escape the drudgery of his job by going to the opera, and it was there that he heard Verdi's Falstaff. "I was totally overwhelmed by it," Drucker recalled.

But what impressed him most was when he later discovered that Verdi's masterpiece—"with its gaiety, its zest for life, and its incredible vitality," as Drucker put it—had been written by a man of 80. "All my life as a musician," Verdi declared, "I have striven for perfection. It has always eluded me. I surely had an obligation to make one more try." Drucker said that these words from Verdi became his "lodestar," helping inspire him to write into his nineties.

Defining a New Mission: For Southwest, Drucker's teachings form a basis to examine all kinds of things, including the most fundamental aspects of the organization. Karlin, for instance, says that her grounding in Drucker made it clear that after Southwest had won its Grammys, it needed a new mission statement. The old one—"to energize and renew the standard chamber music repertory by integrating the best of contemporary world and early music in programs and concerts"—had largely been fulfilled.

"We started thinking, what are we going to do next?" says Karlin, displaying an entrepreneurial orientation that demands certain initiatives be abandoned to make way for the future. Southwest's new mission: "to provide the Southern California and international music communities with concert, recording, and educational programming that reflects the vast diversity of art music from around the world."

This fresh approach has led Southwest to focus on the rich cultural diversity in its own backyard—particularly in the Latin and Asian communities—and has opened the door to new adventures abroad.

Asking the Right Questions: Next year, Southwest will take part in a State Dept.-sponsored cultural exchange with Vietnam that will involve both musical performances and workshops on arts management featuring Drucker's principles.

Today, amid a difficult financial environment, Karlin and her husband, Southwest artistic director Jeff von der Schmidt, are asking a Drucker-like question that is meant to help them spot further opportunities, even with all the challenges: "If we were to begin Southwest now, what would it look like?"

"Peter would have encouraged us to rethink the organization—and that's what we're doing," says Karlin, who has produced a balanced budget for each of the 22 years Southwest has existed.

No One is Immune: For his part, von der Schmidt says Drucker's writings have given him a way to consider the tough artistic choices he must make between embracing new music and sticking with classical compositions. "There really does have to be a balance of continuity and change," says von der Schmidt, pointing to one of Drucker's central themes.

In 2007, Southwest hired Michael Millar, who received his doctorate from Claremont Graduate University, where he studied both musical performance and arts administration. For the latter, his professors included none other than Peter Drucker.

Karlin and von der Schmidt were already familiar with Drucker when Millar arrived, but he has ensured that Drucker's emphasis on mission, customer, results, and plan has been embedded deeper throughout the organization. No one is immune. "It's about making everybody—even the musicians—more effective in what they do," says Millar, Southwest's development director and bass trombone player.

Connecting with Strengths: Millar invokes Drucker, as well, when he shows young people how to play. The typical way to teach an instrument, he says, is for the instructor to listen and then say, "Here's what you did wrong." Millar flips it around, asking, "Now tell me what you did—and start with what you did right."

"Students are able to connect with their strengths and make their weaknesses irrelevant," he explains. "Everybody needs to understand what they do well."

For Southwest itself, that's been turning Drucker into beautiful music. (Copyright BusinessWeek)

   

Chávez - What mesmerising creativity.  The third volume of Southwest Chamber Music’s journey through the complete chamber music of Carlos Chávez presents 10 works, all featuring percussion instruments of various character and materials, often in tandem with winds, brasses, and voices.

The Mexican composer explored the world of tapped, brushed, struck, shaken and stirred instruments with keen affinity both for their timbral colors and their place in his heritage.  It may be impossible to listen to these works without feeling some connection to the soil, history, and people of his homeland.

Every Chávez composition here can be said to claim equal portions of complexity and accessibility.  The ear is always enchanted or jolted by the vivid layering of instrumental and vocal lines.  Chávez’s rhythmic sense is kaleidoscopic, the patterns rarely repeating themselves, the motion altered to achieve maximum textural or expressive impact.

Occasionally, as in the brief Cantos de México, the substance is overtly nationalistic, with affectionate nods to indigenous traditions and historical events.  But Chávez won’t be easily categorised.  In several works with texts, he embraces poetry of countrymen energised by his atmospheric, dramatic settings.  On the other hand, the ballet score Antigona – whose substance is derived from his Sinfonia de Antigona – is more redolent of the work’s Grecian roots than anything Spanish.

Among the highlights is the Partita for Solo Timpani, a late work that finds a performer on seven timpani making a virtuoso odyssey abounding in chromatic sequences and rhythmic puzzles.  At times, Chávez somehow transforms the timpanist into lyrical protagonist.  Ricardo Gallardo’s performance is a tour de force of subtle and forceful artistry. 

But then, all of the musicians on this disc seem to have a direct transport to Chávez’s special galaxy.  The members of the Tambuco Percussion Ensemble are chameleons on dozens of instruments, while mezzo-soprano Suzanna Guzmán, soprano Alba Quezada and the players of Southwest Chamber Music are passionate exponents of the Chávez esthetic.  Oh, to hear these performers in this music in actual concert.

   

More holiday cheer: Bravo to Southwest Chamber Music! The Pasadena-based ensemble has already won two consecutive Grammys for volumes 1 and 2 of “The Complete Chamber Works of Carlos Chavez,” the Mexican composer. Now Volume 3 has vaulted out of the chamber-music category to be nominated for a Grammy for best classical album of the year.

It’s all part of the rise and rise of these locals, who regularly perform at the Norton Simon, the Huntington and the Armory. I’m listening to it as I write, and this is extraordinary music full of timpani and high Mexican loneliness and the liquid voice of mezzo-soprano Suzanna Guzman, another local hero.

   

Carlos Chávez: Complete Chamber Works Volume 3 is the third installment in Southwest Chamber Music’s traversal of the complete chamber music of Mexican composer Carlos Chávez.

This volume focuses on the part of his chamber music that incorporates percussion in a significant way, and presses into service the percussion ensemble Tambuco, a group that takes its name from the title of a Chávez percussion piece. Tambuco has recorded Chávez’ Xochipili, Tambuco and Toccata for Percussion before for the now defunct Dorian label, but all the recordings on this Cambria disc are new. The second time around represents an improvement in all three cases, as these are much sharper and focused performances than the previous ones, in addition to being in better sound.
 
There are a couple of vocal works here, being Cuatro Melodías Tradicionales and Lamentaciónes sung by mezzo-soprano Suzanna Guzmán and Tres Exágonos and Otros Tres Exágonos as performed by soprano Alba Quezada. Guzmán is a Los Angeles-based opera singer renowned for her portrayal of Carmen, and her voice may seem a little heavy in these spindly settings. Nonetheless, the vocal quality employed by Guzmán is in keeping with the type of singer that Chávez would have heard performing these pieces were they were new. By comparison, Quezada, a singing actress, brings the right balance of voice, ensemble and characterization together in Chávez’ two sets of Exágonos. Conductor Jeff von der Schmidt delivers appropriately tart and taut readings of Chavez’ Cantos de México and the first ever recording of Antígona, incidental music written for Jean Cocteau’s Antigone that was eventually revised into Chavez’ oft recorded Sinfonia de Antígona.
 
The real surprise here, though, is the Partita for Solo Timpani, a late work that shows Chavez’ mastery of percussion to its best advantage, expertly played by Ricardo Gallardo of Tambuco. The sound quality of Carlos Chávez: Complete Chamber Works Volume 3 is terrific, and one need not go farther than here to experience the best ever recordings of such Chávez staples as Xochipili and Toccata for Percussion. The first two discs in this series both won Grammy awards; in this case, the third time might again prove a charm, as unusual as that would be.

   

This they assuredly did.  Musicians with a mission, they played like it: elegantly, dramatically, earnestly—and with a great deal of love.  The recording project was a model achievement, and among the honors that came its way was a richly deserved Special Commendation from CMA and ASCAP in 2001.  One of the surprises attached to the collection was the fact that, although the musicians were as adept as can be, the organization itself was young, having been founded only in 1987.  In the ensuing decade and a half, its players—there were about a dozen, all enthusiasts of new music—found themselves digging repeatedly into the catalogs of certain composers, many of whom frequently appeared with the players in concert related activities.  The Composer Portrait Series, as the Cambria set was titled, was essentially a document of these relationships, some of which went back to the ensemble’s beginnings.

I had intended to devote a column to The Composer Portrait Series back when it was new; and although I dipped into the set frequently, I kept delaying the project.  Just after the box appeared, Southwest Chamber Music endured a few personnel changes and I thought I’d wait to see how things settled down after that (and they settled down just fine, I am pleased to report.)  Then, too, it would have been an awfully difficult column to write, since the repertoire was so compelling and so abundant.  What’s more, at about that time when everyone seemed so set on the idea that serious music was in its direst death throes, I figured if I put off this project a few more months, I might not have to grapple with it at all.

And then something miraculous happened.  Cambria issued another CD by Southwest Chamber Music, this time a single disc.  And lo, the task was manageable!  Or it appeared to be manageable at the time; the disc proved to be a series of four CDs, together purveying the Complete Chamber Works of Carlos Chávez.  Volume One was released in 2003, and I’ll be darned if it didn’t receive a Grammy award for Small Ensemble Performance (With or Without Conductor), in honor of the group’s interpretation of the composer’s Suite for Double Quartet, with Southwest’s founding artistic director, Jeff von der Schmidt, conducting.  This was clearly an organization to watch.  And then, against all odds, they went and did it again.  When the 2004 Grammy awards rolled around this past march, there they were taking tops honors again in the same mouthful of a category, this time for the entire disc (again on Cambria), volume Two of the complete Chávez.

This was an extraordinary achievement.  The ensemble’s administration isn’t quite sure if this double whammy is unique in the history of the Grammy awards; but if it isn’t, it’s mighty close to it.  Of course, it’s easy to make light of the Grammys, which to a large extent are PR-influenced popularity contests. (I don’t mean to rain on Southwest Chamber Music’s parade in saying that—and I doubt that I do, since musicians of this quality take such honors in stride and immediately get back to what’s important.)  The principal responsibility of the Grammys is to decide which among a handful of interchangeable, multi-millionaire pop stars is to be anointed in a given year and which is to stand by humbly and endorse his or her checks more toward the edge of the spotlight’s glare.  But when you get down to the categories of the Grammys that are generally consigned to obscurity anyway—did you read about the “Small Ensemble Performance (With or Without Conductor)” award in your local newspaper?—a good deal of critical connoisseurship often comes to bear on the judging.  Certainly that was the case in 2003 and 2004.

Listeners who are familiar with Carlos Chávez at all may know only his Sinfonia india (a.k.a. Symphony No. 2), a massive, colorful orchestral effusion from 1936 that draws on indigenous Mexican melodies and uses native instruments along with the usual forces of a symphony orchestra.  It cemented his position as a composer of works that bridged the popular and the classical, and this he was to a degree.  He was unquestionably the most broadly accomplished and the most influential Mexican composer of his time (he lived from 1899 until 1978), and , following early study with Manuel Ponce and first steps as what we might call a salon composer, he did devote a good deal of energy to writing works on identifiably Mexican themes.  Some felt it was that energy that set him apart from the crowd.  Wrote Ponce in 1921:  “Carlos Chávez is a rare example of fecund studiousness which stands out in our environment of secular laziness...The most striking feature of Chávez’s music is and aspiration for modernism and originality, which is perfectly justified in so young a man.”

The business about “secular laziness” may strike us as rather strong in its negativity, but Ponce was Mexican himself and doubtless had mixed feelings about the widely acknowledged “mañana culture” of his easy-going native land.  A relaxed, free-flowing lifestyle is not a bad thing, and it certainly has a way of informing one’s point of view about life.  Chávez was deeply rooted in this idiosyncratic culture and he both embraced it and fled it.

In 1922, immediately after the end of the Mexican Revolution, Chávez left for Europe, which he didn’t much care for; and the following year he paid his first visit to the United States, which he adored and which became (along with Mexico) a focus of his professional life.  Musical Mexico would have done ill without him.  In 1928, at the age of 29, he was named director of the National Conservatory of Music in Mexico City, and in 1933 he moved up to the position of director in the Department of Fine Arts of the Ministry of Education, a post he held for just a year.  In 1928 he had also founded the Orquesta Sinfonica de Mexico, which he served as permanent conductor, and in 1947 he founded the National Institute of Fine Arts, which he directed through 1952. 

But Chávez was more than a musical nationalist:  he was a twentieth-century modernist, pure and simple—or not so simple.  His musical friends included the likes of Copland (with whom he was widely associated), Cowell, and Varèse, and like them he thought about music in musical terms more than political expression. (He got into some arguments with the painter Diego Rivera over this—but of course everyone got into arguments with Diego Rivera.)  He was an incessantly curious musical thinker.  His book Toward a New Music (1937, in its English-language edition) was a thoughtful essay on modern sonic resources, focusing especially on electronic music and the musical implications of radio, both of which were then very edgy topics.  In 1958-59, he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard; these, published in 1961 (in English) under the title Musical Thoughts, again revealed him to be a visionary musical thinker.  The little volume is particularly notable for detailing a conception of musical form that concentrated neither on such “building-block” elements as rhythm and harmony nor on traditional compositional modes involving repetition and variation.  Instead, Chávez argued for structures derived from what he called the musical spiral.  His idea was that forms might perpetually evolve with a sense of cogency and connectedness yet without repeating themselves.  This goes to the heart of Chávez’s mature musical aspirations, and—thanks to Southwest Chamber Music—we can now hear it in his chamber music.

Volume One opens with Invention I, a grand, 22-minute piece for solo piano.  Not really chamber music, you may say, but it is properly there because it is the first part of a seminal triptych that continues with progressively shorter inventions, for string trio and for solo harp, both of which receive their first recordings here.  Of the three, the piano solo (from 1958) is the most immediately compelling, and it receives a splendid performance here from Gayle Blankenburg.  Jeff von der Schmidt, whose historical and analytical program notes for these recordings are models of their genre, refers to Invention I as “a Mexican Hammerklavier and Concord Sonata rolled into one”, and although that’s a fair metaphor, the work to which I feel it harbors the deepest kinship is Copland’s Piano Variations.  Invention II for string trio (1965) is beautiful but elusive, a fine example of the composer’s essentially intuitive mode of writing.  In the last (third) movement especially, the instruments emerge in solo and duo capacities as the music finds its way.  The harmony is unencumbered and freely ranging: this is not twelve-tone music, but you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it was.  Invention III, for solo harp (here Amy Wilkins), seems a mysterious exercise in self-denial, its severe limitation on available musical materials, enforcing the feeling of claustrophobia.

The Suite for Double Quartet (to which this CD owes its Grammy) is the composer’s own arrangement of material originally written in 1943 as La Hija de Cólquide (The Daughter of Colchis), a ballet for Martha Graham.  The tale of this ballet’s misadventures is long, complicated, and worth reading about in the program booklet.  The bottom line is that Graham, who had taken it for granted that Chávez would write something “very Mexican”, failed to respond to the piece from the outset.  Listening to this deeply committed performance by four wind and four string players, one can only be astonished at her reaction.  Generally slow, it has a formal, ritualistic dignity that precisely evokes the way Graham choreographed and danced.  She ended up re-writing the scenario for the piece and presenting it, quite belatedly, in 1946 under the title Dark Meadow.  That same year the composer created the Suite for Double Quartet out of the ballet score, creating his forces as two mostly discrete ensembles—one of winds, the other of strings—and bringing all together for the conclusion.  A final, three-minute miniature rounds out the CD: Upingos for Oboe, a folk-inspired movement played with gracious lyricism and alert phrasing by Stuart Horn.

Volume Two advances our understanding of the composer through five ensembles of varying character.  Energia, a 1925 work for nine instruments, is clearly born of the machine age.  It displays a cartoonish sort of Modernism, a charmed offspring, perhaps, of L’Histoire du Soldat and Pacific 231. Just as the first volume had included Chávez’s three Inventions, here we are treated to his three Soli, each for a different instrumental grouping.  All manner of monologue and dialogue are examined in these pieces: Soli I for Four Winds, Soli II for Wind Quintet, and Soli IV for Brass Trio.  What happened to Soli III?  It’s a sort of concertante for solo instruments with orchestra, and as such is beyond the purview of this collection.  Soli II seems a response of sorts to Schoenberg, whose own Wind Quintet may come to mind; it includes examples of Chávez experimenting with classic serial procedures.  Soli IV consists of seven movements ranging from four seconds(!) to nearly four minutes in length, and is abstracted to the point of having only metronome marks as movement headings.  It benefits from gorgeous playing, but then everything on these CDs is played magnificently.  At the end comes Chávez’s somewhat known Sonata for Four Horns (1929), an entirely approachable piece that unrolls with the sort of thematic variations and repetition that by this time we will not expect of this composer.

And more surprises lie ahead in the two volumes that are yet to appear, including—within the next few months—some works for percussion that promise to knock one’s socks off.  These first two releases have set the bar high.  Rarely does one encounter CDs whose production values impress so consistently throughout.  By this I mean not just the superb individual and corporate musicianship in each performance, but also the enlightening essays that help the listener understand things that might otherwise escape notice (and with only a few typos), the imaginative and appealing packaging and booklet in a folding case that is more appealing than standard jewelbox, and the very attractive artwork, which so far includes two different cover drawings of the composer by Rivera and in the remaining volumes will feature portraits by David Siqueiros and Rufino Tamayo.  It’s a class act all around.  At this rate, Southwest Chamber Music may just pick up a couple more Grammys.

   

From a distance, Mexico is the source of many beautiful things and the source of much chaos. Strangers are enthralled and maybe even a little frightened by the extravagance - a certain riotousness of emotion and imagination that plays against other deeply civilized elements of Mexican culture. We may never find a way to make sense of the two together. Better to take each element as it comes.

If the music of Silvestre Revueltas at its most unbuttoned confesses a kind of brilliant savagery, that of his contemporary Carlos Chávez is more reasonable, less dangerous. The third of four Cambria CD's by Southwest Chamber Music and the Tambuco Percussion Ensemble devoted to Chávez's chamber pieces shows a composer smoothing and ordering Mexican art's more ardent impulses.

All the elements of Mexico's eruptive beauties are here. Indeed, much of this music is for timpani and percussion. But Chávez, who died in 1978, managed musical composition as well as he did his career, shrewdly and elegantly. Stravinsky and Varèse were friends. Chávez made himself known to the world. Everything in this collection is attractive. Chávez, the Mexican, is at his most uninhibited in the six "Exágonos" after poetry by Carlos Pellicer, with a richly colored instrumental quintet and here the soprano Alba Quezada. The timpanist Ricardo Gallardo and his three Tambuco associates are kept busy, but even in pieces "Xochipilli, an Imaginary Aztec Music" or the Partita for Solo Timpani a sense of neatness hangs over such naturally theatrical opportunities.

Jeff von der Schmidt is the conductor and the mezzo-soprano Suzanna Guzmán sings the "Lamentaciónes" and the "Cuatro Melodías Tradicionales Indias del Ecuador," both with instrumental accompaniments. Chávez had a distinct place in mid-20th-century musical history, and these recordings help us remember it.

   

When Southwest Chamber Music needed management advice for its musicians, it turned to the philosophy of legendary consultant Peter Drucker

As rockers, rappers, and country crooners scoop up their Grammy Awards this weekend, you can be certain that they'll thank all kinds of people for helping to make them stars: producers, agents, the fans and, of course, many a mom.

But there's one Grammy winner of years past that feels it owes a debt to a very different sort of influence: management guru Peter Drucker.

Pasadena (Calif.)-based Southwest Chamber Music has long drawn on Drucker's insights to help it manage the enterprise effectively, as well as to tailor its musical selections. By constantly questioning which programs and strategies have become obsolete, Southwest offers some valuable lessons that can help any organization—no matter what kind of business it's in—hit the right notes. "Reading Drucker became this incredible light bulb for me," says Jan Karlin, the executive director of Southwest, which snared Grammys in 2003 and 2004 for the first two volumes of the Complete Chamber Music of Carlos Chavez.

Verdi Influenced Drucker That an outfit such as Southwest would have a strong affinity for Drucker's work is not surprising, really. Drucker, who saw "management as a liberal art," peppered his books and articles with references to music. "The key to greatness" in any organization, Drucker wrote in a 2002 essay for Harvard Business Review, "is to look for people's potential and spend time developing it.…To build a world-class orchestra requires rehearsing the same passage in the symphony again and again until the first clarinet plays it the way the conductor hears it. This principle is also what makes a research director in an industry lab successful."

Notably, Drucker counted Giuseppe Verdi, the 19th-century Italian composer, as having a tremendous impact on him. In the late 1920s, Drucker lived in Hamburg, where he worked as a trainee at a cotton export firm. Every week, he'd escape the drudgery of his job by going to the opera, and it was there that he heard Verdi's Falstaff. "I was totally overwhelmed by it," Drucker recalled.

But what impressed him most was when he later discovered that Verdi's masterpiece—"with its gaiety, its zest for life, and its incredible vitality," as Drucker put it—had been written by a man of 80. "All my life as a musician," Verdi declared, "I have striven for perfection. It has always eluded me. I surely had an obligation to make one more try." Drucker said that these words from Verdi became his "lodestar," helping inspire him to write into his nineties.

Defining a New Mission: For Southwest, Drucker's teachings form a basis to examine all kinds of things, including the most fundamental aspects of the organization. Karlin, for instance, says that her grounding in Drucker made it clear that after Southwest had won its Grammys, it needed a new mission statement. The old one—"to energize and renew the standard chamber music repertory by integrating the best of contemporary world and early music in programs and concerts"—had largely been fulfilled.

"We started thinking, what are we going to do next?" says Karlin, displaying an entrepreneurial orientation that demands certain initiatives be abandoned to make way for the future. Southwest's new mission: "to provide the Southern California and international music communities with concert, recording, and educational programming that reflects the vast diversity of art music from around the world."

This fresh approach has led Southwest to focus on the rich cultural diversity in its own backyard—particularly in the Latin and Asian communities—and has opened the door to new adventures abroad.

Asking the Right Questions: Next year, Southwest will take part in a State Dept.-sponsored cultural exchange with Vietnam that will involve both musical performances and workshops on arts management featuring Drucker's principles.

Today, amid a difficult financial environment, Karlin and her husband, Southwest artistic director Jeff von der Schmidt, are asking a Drucker-like question that is meant to help them spot further opportunities, even with all the challenges: "If we were to begin Southwest now, what would it look like?"

"Peter would have encouraged us to rethink the organization—and that's what we're doing," says Karlin, who has produced a balanced budget for each of the 22 years Southwest has existed.

No One is Immune: For his part, von der Schmidt says Drucker's writings have given him a way to consider the tough artistic choices he must make between embracing new music and sticking with classical compositions. "There really does have to be a balance of continuity and change," says von der Schmidt, pointing to one of Drucker's central themes.

In 2007, Southwest hired Michael Millar, who received his doctorate from Claremont Graduate University, where he studied both musical performance and arts administration. For the latter, his professors included none other than Peter Drucker.

Karlin and von der Schmidt were already familiar with Drucker when Millar arrived, but he has ensured that Drucker's emphasis on mission, customer, results, and plan has been embedded deeper throughout the organization. No one is immune. "It's about making everybody—even the musicians—more effective in what they do," says Millar, Southwest's development director and bass trombone player.

Connecting with Strengths: Millar invokes Drucker, as well, when he shows young people how to play. The typical way to teach an instrument, he says, is for the instructor to listen and then say, "Here's what you did wrong." Millar flips it around, asking, "Now tell me what you did—and start with what you did right."

"Students are able to connect with their strengths and make their weaknesses irrelevant," he explains. "Everybody needs to understand what they do well."

For Southwest itself, that's been turning Drucker into beautiful music. (Copyright BusinessWeek)