Material Weighs Down Triple Helix’s Strengths

The Boston-based piano trio Triple Helix, founded in 1995, is clearly something special. Pianist Lois Shapiro, violinist Bayla Keyes and cellist Rhonda Rider have a splendid musical chemistry going for them, with virtually perfect dynamic balance, a firm collective sense of rhythm, and fervor and authority when needed.

That said, Triple Helix’s concert in LACMA’s Bing Theater on Monday night--the first of two programs this week--was uneven in quality, but for that, blame some of the material, not the committed performers.

Neither of the Triple Helix commissions by two composers from the Boston area, Arlene Zallman and Lee Hyla, struck any sparks upon first hearing. Zallman’s three-movement Trio “Triquetra” veered from a relatively severe atonal opening movement toward a scherzo/trio that had faint echoes of Bartok.

But at least this piece had some discernable shape, whereas Hyla’s one-movement Piano Trio (a world premiere) was an incoherent succession of disconnected, sometimes abrasive and obsessive episodes.

Yet Triple Helix had no trouble with Bright Sheng’s imaginative Four Movements for Piano Trio, in which Chinese folk influences meet Stravinsky-like energy and percussiveness head on, producing a viable, vital third stream all its own. At the evening’s close, Triple Helix unfurled its conception of Shostakovich’s devastating wartime Piano Trio No. 2, with an effectively scrappy edge in the Scherzo, a heavyset yet not quite brutal pace in the Klezmer-streaked finale, and a cool, neutral, almost demoralized bleakness elsewhere.

Triple Helix plays an all-Beethoven program tonight at 8 in the L.A. County Museum of Art’s Bing Theater, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. $5-15. (323) 857-6010.