Music : New Music Trio in UCLA Concert

Violin, piano and percussion make an unlikely chamber music combination. But it could become a standard format if David Abel, Julie Steinberg and William Winant can reach a wide enough audience.

Certainly they have already generated an impressive body of literature for their instrumentation. Friday they gave stunning performances of four works new to Los Angeles before a small crowd--heavy on composers and critics--at UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall.

The standout work was Paul Dresher’s “Double Ikat,” a substantial, inventive and satisfying post-minimal construct. Its roots are in pure pulse power, but it blossoms in lyric fantasies, ranging from the sentimental to the swinging, and ends in a marvelously centered, introspective quasi-raga.

Delightfully varied in texture, mood and pace, “Double Ikat” passes the solo duties around, including a delicate extended opportunity for piano at the beginning of the third section, beautifully tinted by Steinberg. At the end, Steinberg and Winant proved perfect shadows in a chamber music tour de force, accompanying Abel’s supple, inward violin solo.

“California Family: A Group Portrait” by Daniel Lentz proved a high-calorie bit of chamber pop, the engaging work of the live musicians inflated by taped support to big-band levels of sweetness. But the prettiness of it all was contradicted by the overwhelming amplification, which turned the effort into a raw-sounding assault.

Frederic Rzewski’s “Whangdoodles” is a large mosaic of sound bites, in perceptual effect somewhat like John Zorn’s works for the Kronos Quartet. But it is thematically organized as a sort of double variations, on “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” and a Yiddish folk-song, and given a clear timbral indentity by the prominent use of the hammered dulcimer, deftly played by Winant.

Characteristically spare gestures and elegant sounds impart a real measure of quiet grace to Somei Satoh’s “Toki No Mon” (A Gate into Infinity). A thrillingly taut and controlled performance gave the slender materials the chance to open all manner of gates in willing minds.

Two movements of Lou Harrison’s “Varied Trio”--recently recorded by Abel-Steinberg-Winant--closed the concert in encore.