MUSIC REVIEW : A Gubaidulina Premiere

Music of genuine import, of risking and striving drama, is pouring out of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries these days. Much-discussed composers such as Schnittke, Lutoslawski, Part, Gorecki (to name but a very few) write music that, despite avant-garde methods, seems to speak directly and powerfully to listeners. So does that of Sofia Gubaidulina.

Thursday night the enterprising Southwest Chamber Music Society offered the West Coast premiere of the 61-year-old Russian composer’s 1984 “Quasi Hoquetus,” for viola, bassoon and piano. It didn’t disappoint.

Written in an updated version of the medieval technique of hocket--the splitting up of a single line between two parts--”Quasi Hoquetus” circles its musical ideas on an expanse of silence and bounces them off each other like images in a Miro painting. Fanfares, driving rhythmic impulses, a richly harmonious hymn motif get thrown around and resonate: The viola, in harmonics, sustains the notes of a short burst from the piano; the bassoon and viola hammer out a pattern and the piano, keys down, vibrates with its force.

The scenario unwinds against a blank backdrop; the pregnant pause is part of the plan. A musical idea is ventured and one waits for its consequences. Sometimes nothing happens. Sometimes the bassoon answers irritably in multiphonic complaint.

The 15-minute work needles and soothes, meditates and screams, builds and fades away. It reacts to itself. The technically daunting parts were capably taken by violist Jan Karlin, bassoonist Leslie Lashinsky and pianist Susan Svrcek, in a patient and intense performance.

Balancing this centerpiece in Salmon Recital Hall at Chapman University (the concert was scheduled to be repeated Friday in Pasadena) were solid readings of chamber-music standards.

Cellist Roger Lebow and Svrcek opened with a big, brash and sometimes raw account of Beethoven’s Sonata, Opus 102, No. 1. Violinist Sheryl Staples joined Lebow and Svrcek to close with a fierce and muscular, occasionally rough-edged performance of Schumann’s Piano Trio, Opus 63.