Music Reviews : Bay Area Trio Closes Monday Concerts’ 50th Season

There were surprising signs of life--in a series that has been accused of morbidity--at Monday Evening Concerts this week.

That vitality emerged directly from the performers, the Bay Area trio composed of violinist David Abel, pianist Julie Steinberg and percussionist William Winant. And from a vigorous, varied 20th-Century program made up of works by six American composers--an appropriate close to the venerable series’ 50th season, and its 24th year in residence in Bing Theater at the County Museum of Art.

In energetic, probing and committed performances, all of these pieces sounded important, as well as amusing and/or challenging. Without doubt, the most important is the newest, Lou Harrison’s masterful Trio (1987).

In his steady and unglamorous way, Harrison, the doyen of California composers, has, over a rich and fertile musical life, produced a large, wide-ranging and serious body of work. Some observers may find inconsistencies in his oeuvre, dead ends in his lifelong quest for novelty and new avenues.

On first live hearing, the recent Trio seems to have hit a peak. Deceptively accessible, it flaunts the elegance of simplicity. Ever-humble, it rises to eloquence. Minimal in its materials--Harrison was a minimalist 40 years ago, when today’s composers of that persuasion were children--it utilizes them with a thoroughness and rhetoric that make the total irresistible.

The composer, who turns 71 next week, was not present for this resplendent performance of his Trio. It was preceded by similarly engaging readings of John Cage’s post-Impressionistic Nocturne (1947) for violin and piano; David Rosenboom’s motoric and relentlessly dissonant “Champ Vital . . . Life Field”; Henry Cowell’s jaunty and neo-Baroque “Set of Five” (1952); Peter Garland’s white-on-white, and pentatonic, “Penasco Blanco” (1984), and George Antheil’s self-conscious but still-amusing Sonata No. 2 (1923, for violin, piano and drums).

A small but sympathetic audience--apparently fewer than 100 people--gave this colorful program the attention it deserved.