Music, Dance Reviews : Mischa Season Opens With Reger Work

Music for Mischa, the chamber music series produced by cellist Robert Martin and named for another cellist, the late Mischa Schneider of the Budapest String Quartet, has established itself as one of the more important and consistently enjoyable music series that we have.

Sunday’s offering, the opening of the third season at UCLA, consisted of elements that have already become the expected with Mischa: warm and reliable performances by chamber-music veterans of an intelligent program. No news is good news.

The concert in Schoenberg Hall included two quintets only--seldom-heard works by Beethoven and Max Reger--but proved plenty substantial, challenging even. It was a shame to see so many empty seats.

Reger’s A-major Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, completed shortly before the composer’s death in 1916, is an odd mixture of grace and learning, severity and nostalgia, almost incessant in its counterpoint (with all of the musicians playing almost all of the time) yet gently lyrical in its themes. Its most satisfying moments are its most simple--a strings-only chordal theme in the opening movement, the lovely waltz-like trio of the second--but these seem, after a while, too few and far between.

The performance, an amiable and neatly executed affair lacking nothing in conviction, enlisted violinists Yoko Matsuda and Margaret Batjer, violist Michael Nowak, Martin, and Los Angeles Philharmonic clarinetist Michele Zukovsky.

The concert began with Beethoven’s neglected String Quintet, Opus 29, a transitional work for the composer combining classical stateliness and order with dramatic urgency and expressiveness.

The same performers--minus Zukovsky, plus violist Roland Kato--provided an effortlessly flowing, low-key reading that, despite occasional unsettled intonation, nevertheless convincingly underlined the work’s many facets. Particularly pleasing among many pleasures was the rollickingly performed Scherzo, which built steadily but unobtrusively to a single, offbeat chord, seemingly shining in midair.