MUSIC REVIEW : Arioso Misses Mark by Playing It Safe

SAN DIEGO —  In the specialized arena of chamber music, string players and pianists have long held a virtual monopoly. Only in recent years have other instrumentalists demanded their equal rights as performers.

With a sharp eye for new repertory and a rigorous performing schedule, the locally based Arioso Wind Quintet has won a respectable following and has garnered invitations to play in Utah and Minnesota.

In the San Diego Community Concert Assn.’s season-opening concert Monday night at Copley Symphony Hall, Arioso again demonstrated its fluency, internal balance, and professional polish. But in selecting a program that would not test the musical tolerance of the concert association’s older, highly conservative audience, Arioso fell into an atypical stylistic monotony. Their program was too harmonically unchallenging and too mellifluous: too many desserts and not enough meat and potatoes.

Arioso’s most-winning offering was an arrangement of Maurice Ravel’s piano suite “Le Tombeau de Couperin,” heard last week in yet another arrangement for full orchestra played by the San Diego Symphony. The quintet found the appropriate fleet tempo and lithe quality that eluded the orchestra, subjugating the work’s busy figuration to Ravel’s elegant overarching phrases.

Arioso oboist Peggy Michel shaped the familiar solo in the Menuet movement with sensuous refinement. The other Arioso members are flutist Linda Lukas, clarinetist Marian Liebowitz, bassoonist Dennis Michel and John Lorge on horn.

Another Gallic specialty, Poulenc’s “Suite Francaise,” brought out the ensemble’s wit and vivacity. In the “Petite marche militaire,” Lorge stretched beyond his usual mellow, well-focused tones to some entirely credible trumpetings in the horn’s uppermost range.

Samuel Barber’s “Summer Music,” Op. 31, lost a measure of its intimate charm in the high-ceilinged surroundings of Copley Symphony Hall, although Arioso showed no lack of affinity to the work’s slightly melancholic nostalgia.

Arioso included two organ transcriptions--a set of variations by Jan Sweelinck and a suite of amusements by Franz Joseph Haydn--to represent music prior to the 20th Century.

The Sweelinck was a tribute to the group’s well-balanced counterpoint, and the Haydn allowed a playful indulgence of rubato, but it was all pretty lightweight. A neoclassical dance suite by the Hungarian composer Ferenc Farkas would have made a better impression if Arioso had not already played the Poulenc suite.