MUSIC REVIEW : Northridge Profs Showcase Work

In Northridge, as anywhere in the world, calamities may come and go, but music will out. That was an unstated subtext of the faculty composer recital at Cal State Northridge on Friday, the first such performance since the earthquake struck 13 months ago.

Opening with the most accountably tonal work of the program, Paul Humphreys’ “Toccata Walatowa,” performed by solo pianist Joan Thompson, the event showed resonance of jazz and world music.

From another world entirely, Mark Bobak’s “as if as, (fea, n(o)w” takes its text, not surprisingly, from e.e. cummings poems. The piece takes its procedural cues from cummings as well, as demonstrated beautifully by soprano Jacqueline Bobak.

William Toutant’s broodingly exotic “Quatre Alcools,” also sung by Bobak, turns to the comparatively linear poetry of Guillame Apollinaire. Pianist Lisa Sylvester and percussionist David Johnson provided the varicolored sonic under-painting.

Less effective was Toutant’s Small Suite for Piano, performed valiantly by Dolly Eugenio Kessner, which attempts to mate rhythmic and structural attributes of earlier centuries with a 20th-Century atonal syntax.

Pianist Kessner also performed, alongside composer Daniel Kessner on alto flute, his “Simple Motion.” Inspired simplicity, as a fulcrum toward ever greater complexity, is the goal here. From spare floating tones, the score spins off into thickening plots and quixotic appeal.

In a way, the showpiece came last, with the West Coast premiere of Kessner’s “Two Visions,” the composer conducting. The two-movement work for five players often evokes Far Eastern sonorities and rhythmic displacement, and follows a sensuous ebb and flow of densities. Taut unison lines give way to polyrhythmic rippling effects, and the players weave in and out of degrees of synchronization in a work of generous inventive spirit.