MUSIC REVIEW : A Study in Contrasts by SONAR

LA JOLLA — At reunions and anniversaries, pouring over the family photo album is a customary ritual. To mark the 25th anniversary of the UC San Diego music department--that hotbed of avant-garde composition and performance--the contemporary music ensemble SONOR presented a concert of works by some of the department’s resident composers past and present. Thursday’s program in the Warren Lecture Hall’s Studio A provided the traditional glimpse at the departmental family album.

Compositions by Will Ogden and Robert Erickson, two of the department’s founders who are now professors emeritus, framed the concert. The free-spirited, even playful, approach to music-making embodied in the music of these elders contrasted mightily with the highly calculated, precisely engineered ways of the current crop: Brian Ferneyhough, Roger Reynolds, Joji Yuasa and Rand Steiger.

Though Ogden’s Two Sea Chanteys for soprano, baritone and two percussionists was written in 1988, it exuded the freewheeling spirit that permeated the department in the 1970s. Carol Plantamura and Philip Larson intoned verses by Edith Sitwell and Hart Crane set to Ogden’s jumpy, angular lines, and they augmented the percussionists’ busy accompaniment by playing chimes, tambourines and triangles even as they sang. The effect was a joyous carillon, a rousing fanfare of nautical imagery.

“Cradle II,” written by Erickson in 1972, featured four drummers gently tapping a hypnotic pattern, a kind of rhythmic mantra, surrounded by seemingly random tones emitted by seven string players. Subtle changes of rhythmic intensity shaped the work, which was easy to listen to, but whose masterful design set it apart from minimalism’s easy-listening cliches.

Newest of the evening’s offerings was Steiger’s “Woven Serenade,” a Mozart bicentennial salute commissioned last year by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. In its first local performance, the clarinet quintet, which is based on small motifs densely layered and overlapped, made a pleasant impression. As with Mozart, the message of Steiger’s music did not violate the civilized chamber music decorum.

Violinist Janos Negyesy brought his customary passion and elegant execution to Reynolds’ “Personae,” a chamber concerto written for the soloist in 1990. Tightly scored for eight instruments, prepared tape and solo violin, “Personae” is filled with Reynolds’ typically dense counterpoint. Negyesy burnished its rarefied cadences with welcome warmth of tone, and Steiger neatly conducted the ensemble.

Two solo pieces filled out the program, Ferneyhough’s explosive “Bone Alphabet,” reprised by percussionist Steven Schick, who premiered it at February’s SONOR concert, and Yuasa’s “Terms of Temporal Detailing.” Jon Fonville played Yuasa’s extended technique tour de force for bass flute on an alto flute, robbing the complex etude of some of its sonic richness and depth.

Of course, the new is not always better than the old; Reynolds’ highly engineered complexity is not superior to Ogden’s freewheeling fantasy. Both time and repetition soften the apparent hard edge of the new. No doubt in another 15 years, Reynolds’ and Yuasa’s daunting works will provide nostalgic contrast when performed with the new compositions of their successors.