MUSIC REVIEWS : Santa Fe in L.A.

This year’s touring contingent from the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival blew into Royce Hall at UCLA on Thursday with a typically wide-ranging program and a sterling lineup of artists: violinist Daniel Phillips (replacing the indisposed Joseph Swensen), cellist Marcy Rosen, flutist Ransom Wilson, pianist Jeffrey Swann and tenor Robert White.

White opened the concert by bringing his sweet, fragile tenor and canny musicality to bear on eight of Beethoven’s British folk song arrangements, deftly accompanied by the ensemble, after which the stage was set with paraphernalia, including microphones, blue lights and yards of wiring, that might be considered alien to a “serious” chamber music concert.

But this was, in a sense, ever-enterprising Santa Fe, and the music was the 1971 “Vox Balaenae” (Voice of the Whale) by the non-avant-gardist’s one-time favorite avant-gardist, George Crumb. The 20-odd minute piece is performed by three players wearing black half-masks.

It’s easy to snigger at the composer’s spacey verbal program, and there were a few titters from the audience when the masked players--Wilson, Rosen, Swann--entered. There was a bit of shifting in seats, too, when Wilson began to sing humpback whale-type songs into his flute.

Still, “Vox Balaenae” remains an intriguing study in timbres that, with its mistily East Indian languidity, soothes rather than grates.

The evening’s more conventional offerings were Dvorak’s Four Romantic Pieces, heroically projected by Phillips and Swann, and a relentless, grandly rhetorical reading by Swann, Phillips and Rosen of Smetana’s doom-laden Trio in G minor.