MUSIC REVIEW : Kapell Trio Makes West Coast Debut in a Unique Setting

For its West Coast debut, the fine Kapell Trio headed up the hill in Silver Lake to a lofty, quirky chamber. In the final event of this season’s Chamber Music in Historic Sites series on Sunday afternoon, the chamber in question was the living room of an architectural landmark.

In the striking, organically flowing structure of Silvertop, designed by John Lautner in 1957, a series of wedges and arcs intersect in an asymmetrical composition that blurs expressionism with Space Age zeal a la the Jetsons. A picture window peering dramatically over the reservoir suggests that the living room’s edge might be the lip of a proscenium stage.

This powerful dose of ambience at times threatened to steal the show from the trio--pianist Stephen Swedish, violinist Christopher Lee and cellist David Szepessy--which offered strong readings of Mozart and Beethoven, and a conceptually wobbly jazz-inflected work by David Baker. Heard in its West Coast premiere, Baker’s “Roots II” (1992) is a noble contrivance in the oft-ventured, rarely successful melding of jazz and classical elements.

Baker covers many idiomatic bases, from John Coltrane-ish modal exoticism to a deconstructionist boogie-woogie to a “Jubilee” movement more turgid than jubilant. This is music about jazz rather than an expression burbling up from that tradition, lacking that certain something called swing.

The trio fared much better on more familiar turf. It crisply sculpted Mozart’s Trio in C, K. 548, a genteel work that is egalitarian in terms of instrumental focus. Handily switching expressive modes, the trio brought apt Romantic gusto to Beethoven’s Trio in D, Opus 70, No. 2--also known as the “Ghost Trio.”

Themes chase and trip over other themes and, in the extended Largo, a would-be simple melody squirms like a ghostly creature in a fever dream. In the final movement, after all the sweaty brooding, it ends on a bright, upbeat note.

Likewise, the Kapell Trio’s bold debut, and this fascinating series.