Dallas’ Voices of Change explores modern chamber music from 1938 to 2022

Voices of Change, Dallas’s modern music ensemble, offered another enterprising and appealing program Sunday afternoon at Southern Methodist University’s Caruth Auditorium. Supplying a good deal of sonic variety, the music was all American, except for the opening Duo for violin and viola by Greek composer Nikos Skalkottas.

Dallas-based Quinn Mason, who’s studied with teachers at SMU and the University of Texas at Dallas, has a rising national profile as a composer, and increasingly as a conductor. Composed in 2016 and revised a year later, his song cycle Confessions from a Dream sets five poems by the late American conductor James DePreist.

Unfortunately, no texts were provided, so it was impossible to know how the music fit the words. And although Virginia Dupuy sang artfully, even dramatically, I’d like to hear the songs with a brighter voice and leaner vibrato. (Though billed as a soprano, Dupuy sounds more mezzo-ish.)

The music’s general effect is of updated impressionism. The vocal writing seems natural, mostly flowing except in the nimble “Transitions” and frantic “Frenzy of Reason.” Victor Diaz Hurtado was the sympathetic pianist.

Two winners of Voices’ 2022 Young Composers Competition were represented by nicely crafted one-movement string quartets composed just last year.

In Radiance Rising, inspired by anime openings, Ben Spivey imagines the violins as melodists, the viola as an electric guitar, the cello as percussion, progressing to a dancelike ending. Mary Brook Hartmann’s Lost Shadows shares melodic and chattering rhythmic impulses back and forth among the instruments, on the way to an agitated end. Both pieces were persuasively played by violinists Bing Wang and Maria Schleuning (who’s also Voices artistic director), violist Desirée Elsevier and cellist Kari Kettering.

One of the heftier selections was the 1997 Of Risk and Memory, for two pianos, by Arlene Sierra. Twelve minutes long, it alternates ruminative, harmonically ambiguous music suggestive of Alexander Scriabin with edgy passages of repetitive patterns studded with syncopations. The ending is almost desperately brilliant. Hurtado and Liudmila Georgievskaya were the superb pianists.

From Eric Ewazen, best known as a composer for winds and brass, came a 1992 Trio in E-flat for the unusual combination of trumpet, violin and piano. A capable practitioner of what might be called populist modernism, Ewazen mostly favors the trumpet’s lower-lying lyric possibilities over more blatant effects, but the finale celebrates in Mexican-flavored rhythms. Trumpeter John Holt and pianist Steven Harlos joined Schleuning in a deft and engaging performance.

The Skalkottas was the earliest of the pieces, but also the prickliest in rhythms and tartest in dissonance. The three movements progress from agitation to dark ruminations to an unsettled finale that allows suggestions of melody to surface here and there. Schleuning and Elsevier dispatched it with impressive virtuosity.