Entering Valhalla, with an edgy beat

In increasingly commercial Santa Monica, arts and artists are in danger of becoming a scenic coast’s next endangered species. But cultural environmentalists are working to prevent that from happening. And one particularly successful tactic has been the planting and cultivating of Jacaranda.

Jacaranda is a chamber music series that focuses on the 20th century and has the motto “Music at the Edge of Santa Monica.� To open its fourth season Saturday, it moved four blocks east of its usual spot, First Presbyterian Church of Santa Monica, which is a block from the sea and now under renovation.

The event was an eight-hour marathon reprising highlights from the series’ first three years. And the temporary site was the recently renovated Barnum Hall at Santa Monica High School.

Barnum is a Westside treasure reborn but thus far undernourished. This 1,200-seat, 1937 Art Deco auditorium with excellent acoustics was recently restored, as was Stanton Macdonald-Wright’s fabulous fire- curtain mural of the gods entering Valhalla.

The building now awaits a Santa Monican with vision and the powers of persuasion to get school and city bureaucrats to put it to regular use. As Jacaranda’s marathon proved, there can be more to this town than surf, sand and mall.

The marathon, performed in front of Macdonald-Wright’s swirling, graphic gods, was a swirling, graphic Pan-American pantheon. It began with Copland and Ives, dipped into Latin America, paid tribute to Steve Reich’s 70th birthday and landed in the California of Lou Harrison, John Cage, John Adams and Terry Riley.

A good part of Jacaranda’s formula for success has been its fostering of excellent, neglected local talent. The three dozen musicians who took part were a mosaic of Southern California music-making, first-rate players who divide their lives between performing in regional orchestras, teaching and anonymous studio work.

One particularly noteworthy Jacaranda discovery is the lively, rhapsodic, technically excellent Denali Quartet. It offered a riveting account of the great Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas’ ferocious Fourth Quartet. It added an exciting clarinetist, Donald Foster, for the searing 40-minute klezmer rhapsody “Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind� by the Argentine American new music superstar Osvaldo Golijov. It brought in three more string players for the luminous septet version of Adams’ early hit “Shaker Loops.� And two Denali members broke off to give a fervent account of Ives’ Trio with pianist Gloria Cheng.

Probably, though, the heart of the Pan-American musical experience in the 20th century was percussive. Cuban composer Amadeo Roldan’s “Ritmica No. 5,� written in 1930, was the first all-percussion score, and 11 bangers and beaters swayed and shook in Barnum as if this were music written yesterday.

Varese’s “Ionization,� composed a year later, can sound uptight next to the rocking Roldan, but it remains touching in its futuristic foresight and received an authoritative account here conducted by the still lively William Kraft, who at 83 is the dean of West Coast percussion.

Kraft also led Harrison’s 1959 Concerto for Violin and Percussion, a work he made the first recording of in 1960. Saturday’s performance, which rose from ferocity to lyricism, featured another important Jacaranda find, violinist Joel Pargman. But the most percussive music of all was probably Eduardo Delgado’s high-style hammering of the keyboard in two sonatas by the Argentine modernist Alberto Ginastera.

Still, it was Cheng’s performance of Adams’ 25-minute essay in high minimalism, “Phrygian Gates,� that proved the evening’s greatest surprise. She has played it often, recorded it and is a reliable master of its repetitive style. But now, she’s rethought it, giving it a freshly seductive, sensual, dramatic contour.

The low point was Reich’s Bali-inspired Music for Mallet, Voices and Organ. It fell apart. So, almost, did Riley’s “In C,� the marathon’s final hour. A dominatingly loud pulse drowned quiet playing. But in moments when the ensemble of percussion, winds, cello, bass and harp came together, there was beauty.

The garland for endurance goes to pianist Robert Thies and flutist Pamela Vliek, two more excellent young players. They began the day with Copland’s Flute Duo (which I missed, lost in Samohi’s parking maze) and were among those who brought beauty to “In C.�

Jacaranda will remain on the move until it returns to First Presbyterian in April. But being on the edge is as much a point of view as a point in space.

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