Like the old-fashioned code that forbade the socially correct from wearing white after Labor Day, the doyens of the San Diego music scene have apparently decreed that no organization shall start its fall season before October. Fortunately we are blessed with a few stalwart nonconformists who have happily ignored this ban, and Friday (Sept. 17) both Bonnie Wright of Fresh Sound Series at SUSHI Gallery and Beth Ross-Buckley of Camarada opened their respective 2010-2011 seasons.

Camarada, a chamber music collective whose constellation of performers changes kaleidoscopically with each program’s chosen repertory, returned to the dark, high-ceilinged, candlelight-flickering Great Hall of St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral for its opening night concert. The semi-darkness of the venue adds a sense of mystery to the music-making, for we see the players’ faces only in the scant halo of their music stand lights.

Camarada

^{Courtesy photo}

There is nothing mysterious, however, about Camarada’s approach to programming. Typically, they take a familiar standard, in this case Mozart’s evergreen “Kegelstatt” Trio for Clarinet, Viola and Piano, K. 498, and surround it with winning but infrequently heard pieces. Friday’s program ran the gamut from Arthur Foote, a genteel, Boston Victorian (rather forgotten these days), to the affable, contemporary Midwesterner Libby Larson. Every selection proved highly idiomatic to the instruments involved, especially the clarinet, even if, as in the case of Foote’s sedate “Sarabande and Rigaudon," the craft of composition overshadowed the inspiration of musical ideas.

The members of Camarada gave as polished and passionate account of Mozart’s Trio, K. 498, as I have heard, and the sense of balance among these players was nonpareil. Clarinetist Sheryl Renk favored a cool, refined timbre for her instrument, one that placed it closer to the flute’s purer sound rather than the richer color of other reed instruments. Yet, in Mozart’s brisk, octave-spanning arpeggios, Renk conjured an appealing, brighter sound that added excitement to these sections.

In Mozart’s day, the clarinet was a new instrument, one so dear to his heart that he wrote the first major (and arguably the finest) Clarinet Concerto, and when he took to re-score Handel’s great oratorio “Messiah” for the orchestra of the late 18^th-century, Mozart had no qualms about adding in a pair of clarinet parts to “improve” the master’s craft.

Violist Travis Maril infused vitality and a keen edge into the viola part, knowing that his instrument was the composer’s favorite string instrument. Historians are quite certain that Mozart himself played this part when it premiered in Vienna in 1786. And pianist Dana Burnett’s suave, finely detailed playing fused the Trio performance into one that maintained both its courtly elegance and its playful exuberance.

With its rippling, neo-classical style, Larson’s four-movement “Barn Dances” for flute, clarinet and piano complemented well the Mozart. I don’t mean to put Larson, an inventive and bright composer, into that old Paul Hindemith-style neo-classical pigeonhole, for Larson is far less predictable than the doctrinaire German-American apostle of mid-20^th century neo-classicism. Her style embodies a laudable forward-driving motion and continuity that the crabbed and ever- striving-for-novel-effects approach that, say, Brian Ferneyhough and his circle represent.

While “Barn Dances” invokes numerous aspects of rural life, like Aaron Copland before her, Larson imbues her musical take on this rustic milieu with ample urbane sophistication. I was amused by her clever deconstruction of popular song in the second movement (“Divide the Ring”), where her lavish descending riffs for flute and clarinet—deftly executed by flutist Ross-Buckley and Renk—reminded me of another Midwestern composer, William Bolcom. Larson’s whirlwind of cleverly layered ostinati and the persistent high-pitched trills of the finale, “Rattlesnake Twist,” provided a bit of amusing and colorful tone painting.

It was a great pleasure to hear Ernest Bloch’s rarely programmed “Concertino” for Flute and Viola, written in 1950—the year Libby Larson was born. Demonstrating Bloch’s later, effusive, modal style, the “Concertino” is a cornucopia of melodic invention, conceived at a time when other “serious” American composers caught up in Schoenberg’s 12-tone system privately lamented, “Quick, stop me before I write a melody!” Burnett made a highly convincing case for the piano reduction of the original orchestra part, taming its technical challenges with apparent ease and making Bloch’s counterpoint sing mightily. Both Ross-Buckley and Renk gave their solo themes apt brio and consistently shapely phrasing.

All four players brought the concert to a rousing close with Camille Saint-Saens’ “Tarentelle,” Op. 6, a whirling dervish of a piece far too clever for its own good. This program repeats Sunday (Sept. 19) at La Jolla's Neurosciences Institute.

Click Here for Camarada Program and Bios