CSUN Professor’s Clarinet Trio to Be Premiered on Saturday

Frank Campo, head of the composition department at Cal State Northridge, was playing Johannes Brahms’ clarinet trio at a traditional “year-end chamber music bash” and enjoyed the ensemble so much he wrote one of his own.

The work, “Trio for Clarinet, Cello and Piano,” will be premiered in a concert at 8 p.m. Saturday in the Music Recital Hall at CSUN, 18111 Nordhoff St. The concert features compositions by members of the area chapter of the National Assn. of Composers, including “Homenagem--in Memoriam Heitor Villa-Lobos” by Aurelio de la Vega and “Droning for Clarinet and Viola” composed this year by Daniel Kessner, both of the CSUN music composition faculty.

The concert also includes “Impromptu Music for Solo Cello” by Robert Stewart, composition professor at Cal State Fullerton, and “Quatro Canciones Sobre Poesias de Federico Garcia Lorca” by Morten Lauridsen, who teaches composition at USC. “The concert will have a kind of cross section from avant-garde to less aggressively avant-garde,” said Campo, who recently received a $500 award from ASCAP as part of its support of composers. “There will be something for everybody; music in which melody is important and the rhythms are exciting.”

In addition, Kessner’s “Droning” will use some elements of randomness. The musicians play specified notes but are left to choose their duration, relying on occasional rallying points to keep from wandering too far astray.

Unlike some composers who bemoan the difficulty of getting their music played, Kessner said it is fairly easy to get performances of original solo and chamber music, although he agrees that arranging concerts of larger works is more of a problem.

And, in contrast to the common complaint that the only thing more difficult than getting a composition premiered is getting it played again, Kessner said it isn’t always so hard: “If the performers like it, they’ll keep playing it; otherwise they will try something else.”

Tickets for the concert are $5, or $2 for students and senior citizens.

A debut of a different sort will be made next Sunday, as Conrad Immel conducts his first performance as music director of the San Fernando Valley Chorale, a 30-voice community choir founded in the early 1970s.

The “Autumn Serenade” concert will include a medley of Irving Berlin tunes, music from “Oklahoma!” and Randall Thompson’s “Alleluia.” Allegro, an octet conducted by Margaret Blair, will perform selections including Aaron Copland’s “Ring-a-Ching-Chaw.”

A donation will be requested at the performance, at 2:30 p.m. at Our Savior’s First Lutheran Church, 16603 San Fernando Mission Blvd., Granada Hills.