Khaner/Abramovic concert at Settlement

All four of the new pieces on this recital by flutist Jeffrey Khaner and pianist Charles Abramovic came from a new venture, the Anthony P. Checchia Composers Commissioning Project, which honors the founder of the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. For this round, the commission stipulated that the music should be at a technical level suitable for a skilled amateur. So when these two superb musicians began to play, especially in the works by of Jan Krzywicki and Adam Wernick, a collective raising of the eyebrows occurred on this point.

In fact very good musicians can use style and advanced technique to make simpler music sound sophisticated. Khaner, whose day job is principal flutist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, produced a range of tonalities in his playing in Krzywicki's Five Lyrics that seemed to mimic other instruments. In the same work, Abramovic calmly flicked off rapid clusters of notes, emulating the gentle spattering of raindrops.

To be sure, the Krzywicki work probably pushes the very outer limits of what very good amateurs can manage. Krzywicki even admitted, in a roundtable discussion of the works prior to the performance, that it's difficult for him to write simply.

That doesn't mean that his music is overly complex. As is the case in this arresting new work, complexity is a part of Krzywicki's language but doesn't define it. His music may be filled with dissonance and unconventional shapes, but it always coheres into an elegant and utterly accessible construction. These five short pieces— inspired by bird song and play, with strong echoes of Debussy and especially Messiaen— were alert and compelling at every turn.

Father and daughters

Wernick's Dream/Play is a three-section solo piano work directly inspired by this young father's interactions with his two daughters. The music is overtly jazzy, and Abramovic carried it off with wonderful panache, but the material seemed largely derivative.

The evening's most conservative music— at least in terms of structure and instrumental technique— came from Ingrid Arauco. Not that that her music lacks imagination: Arauco's voice in the four-movement Vistas for flute and piano is somewhat subdued but still evocative, even impressionistic. This performance conveyed a kind of dreamy timelessness.

Musical Philadelphia travelogue

The music of Curt Cacioppo displayed the greatest theatrical range of the bunch in Philadelphia Diary, his five-section local musical travelogue for solo piano. His mood ranged from solemn— as in his depiction of the Treaty Elm where William Penn met with the Lenape in 1682— to mock pompous (and funny) in his tone poem on the Masonic Temple.

Perhaps Cacioppo's finest postcard was the last, a modern-day reflection on Boathouse Row, from the vantage point of the rearview mirror of a car leaving the city on the Schuylkill Expressway. The music describes the cacophony of traffic, the pitter-patter of jazz on the radio and the chatter of traffic reports; then, with a quick glimpse of the reflection of one of this city's most iconic views, the music drifts into a sweet interlude, a waking dream. Lovely.