In earlier times, when pianist Peter Serkin was something of an enfant terrible and a member of the contemporary ensemble TASHI in the early 1970s, his challenging programming could shake up the routine—and audiences—of chamber music. Now that he is a grandfather and the economic recession has made many music presenters even more timid, it was encouraging to see a glint of Serkin’s radical pluck at La Jolla’s Sherwood Auditorium concert on Saturday (March 6).

Serkin was in town to perform Johannes Brahms’ F Minor Piano Quintet, Op. 34, with the Orion String Quartet, the sort of meat-and-potatoes standard repertory that gets partons to renew their subscriptions. But before Serkin and friends got to the Brahms comfort food, he played Charles Wuorinen’s “Scherzo for Piano,” a flinty, atonal piece composed for Serkin in 2007 to celebrate the composer’s 70th birthday.

Peter Serkin.

^{Courtesy photo}

Sporting a sparkling if spare texture, Wuorinen’s “Scherzo for Piano” lived up to its name with its breathless, playful character and rapid flourishes that sprayed up and down the keyboard. Serkin dispatched this daunting etude with the apparent ease that Horowitz displayed when he would serenely encore a movement from Robert Schumann’s “Scenes from Childhood,” although translating Wuorinen’s thorny score to the piano keyboard no doubt involved far greater demands than Schumann’s gentle reflections.

Schumann sometimes called Brahms’ chamber works “veiled symphonies,” and the Piano Quintet, Op. 43, regularly rises to symphonic proportion with ambitious ideas and complex structures clad in the richest sonorities the piano and string quartet can fuse. Serkin and Orion proved a good match, with the pianist’s more refined approach to Brahms' linear writing balancing Orion’s rich, old-world sonority and panache that at times threatened to swamp the composer’s classical aesthetic.

The dialogue between the piano and strings in the Andante could not have been more elegant. Serkin’s understated assertions were answered with acutely balanced responses from the quartet. The ensuing Scherzo bristled with vibrant declamation from the ensemble, although it is revealing that the composer’s lighter side—a scherzo movement usually invites either subtle or rambunctious humor—is expressed in a carefully worked out fugue, which the players turned out splendidly.

Throughout the evening, I was continually drawn to cellist Timothy Eddy’s full, burnished lines and the generous arch of his phrasing, a trait that made the Brahms Finale even more resplendent and rewarding. The other Orion members are brothers Daniel Phillips and Todd Phillips, who trade first and second violin positions, and violist Steven Tenenbom.

In the program’s first half, Orion offered Beethoven’s E-flat Major String Quartet, Op. 74 (the “Harp”) and a single movement from J. S. Bach’s magnum opus “The Art of Fugue.” Orion’s reverent approach to Beethoven’s second movement, the Adagio, ma non troppo, expressed the composer’s confident humanism with grace and depth, although I did not sense an equal intensity in the other movements.

Choosing to play just the short opening movement J. S. Bach’s “The Art of Fugue” puzzled me. It was like being served a delicious appetizer and having the waiter come by and snatch the plate away after the first satisfying bite.

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