Both the medium and the message were delightfully different at the Friends of Chamber Music concert Sunday afternoon at UOP's Faye Spanos Concert Hall. CELLO, an unusual ensemble of four cellos, offered a concert of mostly modern music with strong jazz overtones.

The four attractive young women of the quartet, which was formed in 1988 and has since received international acclaim, are Julie Albers, Maureen McDermott, Caroline Stinson, and Laura Bontrager. Though they played with exemplary technique and musicality, it's the energy and conviction of their performance and the charming stage presence they exhibited that enabled the audience to share the musicians' enthusiasm for the repertoire. Small chamber ensembles seldom utilize multiples of the same instrument, as their identical ranges and tone qualities limit the scope of the composition. Cellos, however—with their extended range of more than four octaves and the markedly different tonal timbres within this range—offer considerably more possibilities for compositional interest.

These possibilities were exploited in a program of 13 works containing a mix of transcriptions and new compositions expressly written for this type of ensemble. The emphasis was on the new, with only two composers, Vivaldi and Debussy, not being contemporary.

The successful uses of this novel instrumentation were most evident in the original works, such as Queen Anne's Lace, written for CELLO by Peter Schickele, better known by his alter ego, P.D.Q. Bach.

The piece is a five-part suite in a lighthearted baroque manner, but each movement becomes progressively more modern in mood and harmonies. Its Aria movement, a lyric solo with a pizzicato accompaniment by the other three instrumentalists, illustrated the cello tone at its finest.

Similarly, Villa-Lobos' Bachianas Brasileiras No.1, though pared down somewhat from its cello-orchestra form, retained all the characteristic beauty of that instrument's voices. On the other hand, the transcriptions of Debussy piano pieces, La fille aux cheveux de lin and Sarabande, while interesting, lost some of the clarity of chordal definition to be heard in the originals.

The modern works presented varied from the remorseless energy of Mark Weber's hip-hop Walking Man to the sumptuous, almost impressionistic Stretched on the Beauty by Andrew Waggoner, heard here in its world premiere.

The moderns also included works by Jeff Beal, Miles Davis, the Beatles, Ilan Rechtman, and Paul Desenne. The last's minimalist The Glass Bamboo Frog Consort, with two of each cello's strings deliberately tuned lower, had an unsettling similarity to the sound of a grade-school string section tuning up.

Overall, it proved an innovative, sometimes challenging, always enjoyably and involving program. It was also a credit to the scope and variety of the Friends of Chamber Music series.

—The Stockton Record