By Aaron Keebaugh

Dramatizing the clash between tradition and experimentation — they are often two vastly different artistic worlds — requires bold programming.

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

Searching through the cracks of music history routinely brings to light composers who don’t fit into the all-too-easily packaged parameters of “pure” aesthetic narratives. All too often that leads to a lazy dependence on the conventional. Yes, students and teachers alike need a clear foundation on which to build a more complex knowledge. But the upshot tends to reduce music’s past to a neat Hegelian list of high achievers who necessarily triumphed over mediocrities.

The truth is, there are composers who deserve to be heard even though they were not always on the cutting edge of their time. Some composers refracted the latest styles through the musical language they had inherited and were comfortable exploring. In that sense, their compositions reflect the cultural confusions and contradictions of their period, turmoil that they didn’t quite rise above. Dramatizing the clash between tradition and experimentation — they are often two vastly different artistic worlds — requires bold programming.

Leave it to the Chameleon Arts Ensemble to explore a set of composers who wavered between the boundaries of the familiar and challenging. The group’s recent performance of music by Darius Milhaud, Erich Korngold, George Rochberg, Pavel Haas, and Alban Berg proved that, if you inspect the dusty corners of the past carefully enough, there are more than a few rare gems.

One of the pieces in the performance was a bold step in a direction that artists and intellectuals were just beginning to take seriously at the time. Milhaud’s Le création du monde was one of the first European scores to blend lean Bachian textures with the idiosyncrasies of contemporary jazz. Its original scoring, for mixed winds and strings, sought to mirror the feel of a band playing in a ’20s Parisian cafe. The little-heard version for string quintet, played by the Chameleons, conveys a different spirit, clinging a bit harder to the old-world traditions. That interest in looking back was evident in the sheer breadth the Chameleons brought to Le création’s opening and closing sections. They treated the Prelude with sweep and finesse, generating considerable romantic plushness amid the modernistic thorniness. The musicians played the ensuing Fugue with generous rubato, so it danced with a down-home swagger with every bluesy turn. Other passages look ahead, expressing a Gershwin-like playfulness (Milhaud predated the latter’s Rhapsody in Blue by two years). Quicksilver sections kicked up plenty of grit. Still, balances were kept in keen focus — the musicians traded passages between piano and strings with breathless ease.

Similarly, Erich Korngold’s Suite for Two Violins and Piano Left-Hand walked the wire between lush and bold colors, occasionally slipping into the extremes of both. Throughout its five movements, this score roils with intensity aplenty. Piano figures and strings in octaves generated a palpable zest. The musicians were comfortable enough to let the second movement swing wildly between tension and exuberance.

The third movement turned out to be surprisingly impish, even demonic in its driving figures and prickly textures. The Chameleons charged through the musical thickets with gusto. The Lied and finale, by contrast, delivered welcome moments of hymnic glow. Here, melodies flowed gracefully in a blend of Schubertian delicacy and Brahmsian grandeur. Yet it was all upended by an intrusion of stabbing dissonances, a signature of the bristly new musical world that has pricked Korngold’s attention.

Other composers on the program countered contemporary musical conventions by going in the opposite direction. Fewer composers upset the modernistic apple cart with the determination of George Rochberg, who adopted a romantic musical language partly because of personal tragedy. Following the death of his son in the mid-’60s, Rochberg found that the brash dissonances he had been exploring for decades failed to lift his broken spirit. So he turned to plush textures and sweeping lines, often mixing them with the stinging harmonies inspired by 12-tone composition. The effect stunned the academic establishment.

Rochberg’s music unapologetically leans into contrary extremes. Harsh sonorities framed the buttery center of the aptly named Between Two Worlds, scored for flute and piano. Dissonances, launched between bold calls and dense chords, shatter the dominant texture as if it were glass. But his “Night Scene” section is an ever riskier departure, the music unfolding in velvety lyricism. The Sarabande also languishes in romantic gestures before the finale brings back the breathy and angular gestures of the opening. Flutist Deborah Boldin and pianist Mika Sasaki played the score with deft assurance.

Pavel Haas’s Wind Quintet likewise blended the sumptuous and the gnarly. This attractive score unfolds in meandering lines that circle back upon themselves over a series of staccato bangs. In this case, prickly textures are spiced up with an exotic folksiness. Spiky and mordant, the piece was played with frantic verve by the Chameleons.

Clarinet and lower winds contribute klezmer-like wails in the second movement. Elsewhere, dusky harmonies generate bits of gravitas, as if the performers were taking some of their time to ruminate. But this music searches for a nonexistent resolution. The third movement’s march blazes forth and rarely abates. The finale was shrouded in mystery: icy dissonances were stacked up to beguiling effect. The only solace came in the closing bars, where sudden consonances infused the music (finally) with light.

The Adagio from Alban Berg’s Kammerkonzert offered a brief respite from the evening’s tension. The Chameleons’ pensive reading generated an earnestness that withstood the knots of dense harmonies. Still, there were surprises aplenty; jagged figures burst forth only to reverse themselves just as suddenly in the tempestuous back-and-forth. All of its mood swings aside, the performance conveyed a consistent ease. The Chameleons guided us skillfully between the extremes of music that straddled “two worlds.”

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.