By Aaron Keebaugh

The group presented a program of edgy music with the bloom of youth.

The Chameleon Arts Ensemble in action. Photo: courtesy of the artists

The Chameleon Arts Ensemble closed out the calendar year last weekend by exploring music written in the throes of youth. Beethoven’s Piano Quartet No. 3, penned at age 15, showed glimmers of the composer to come. So did Leonard Bernstein’s Clarinet Sonata of 1941-1942, blazing with all of that composer’s boundless energy. And George Enescu’s Octet was so difficult and convoluted for 1900 that a conductor cancelled its premiere because he found it too risky to perform.`

Even Chinary Ung’s Child Song, while composed during middle age, represented a bold new direction. Following the Cambodian Khmer Rouge genocide, in which many of his family perished, Ung took a decade to study, publish, and record traditional Cambodian music. Child Song, written in 1985, was his first score after his self-imposed hiatus.

Scored for flute, violin, cello, and piano, the piece is rife with the thorny harmonies and prickly textures that empower the mid-twentieth-century avant-garde. Still, the music generates lyricism in a way that recalls the work of Ung’s teacher, George Crumb. Beautiful shapes arise with every shift in color. Bent notes, plucked piano strings, and the rush of filigree churn with the compulsion of a quiet tempest. All of this activity gradually coalesces into a composition marked by ringing high notes and a driving pulse. Last Sunday, Deborah Boldin’s flute served as a dependable protagonist, her velvety tone delivering moments of solace. Rafael Popper-Keizer’s cello was by turns silvery and burnished. But this reassurance was never an empty gesture. Child Song conveyed a sense of eerie solace.

In contrast, Enescu’s Octet, among his most daring creations, felt urgent, even turbulent. The performance was quite a feat given the music’s very challenging harmonic framework. Spanning forty minutes, the piece unfolds as a complexly elongated process. Passages slip in, out of, and around closely related keys. Yet it also features a folk-like sweep whose gritty tension looks ahead to Bartók.

The Chameleon musicians played the Octet with wild abandon, conveying each turn of its wayward angst. And, through all that twisting and contorting, the players worked as one to bring out the composition’s vibrant colors. The Scherzo lurched forward zestfully. The third movement was haunting, even ethereal. Lines glowed with a silvery resonance as earlier themes returned in the closing bars. This music captures the essence of fin-de-siècle decadence, and the Chameleon Arts Ensemble was a fine-tuned time machine.

Dealing with Beethoven’s Piano Quartet in C major, WoO 36, the group wisely let the piece’s stylistic idiosyncrasies emerge gradually. They channeled Mozartean grace in the opening movement. Francesca dePasquale (violin), Scott Woolweaver (viola), and Sarah Rommel (cello) maintained a lithe balance, buoyed by pianist Jessica Xylina Osborne’s crystalline figures. But, as the performance progressed, they tore into each line with greater fervor. Even during the Adagio con espressione the musicians’ unified sound carried weight and grandeur. They revelled in the finale’s biting playfulness, recognizing that the sonic edge, characteristic of an older Beethoven, was on display.

Regarding Bernstein’s Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, hewing to the edge was de rigueur. Clarinetist Gary Gorcyca and pianist Osborne made an ideal pairing, tossing off with assurance the music’s angular lines, glassy chromaticism, and rippling torrents. Colors were just as abundant: Gorcyca’s clarinet sound gleamed with honeyed tone; Osborne’s piano accompaniment surrounded him in vibrant clouds of sound, shimmering one moment, pearly the next. This may have been a work of puckish youth, but these musicians managed to probe its maturish depths.

Aaron Keebaugh has been a classical music critic in Boston since 2012. His work has been featured in the Musical Times, Corymbus, Boston Classical Review, Early Music America, and BBC Radio 3. A musicologist, he teaches at North Shore Community College in both Danvers and Lynn.