FIVE NOT-SO-EASY PIECES.

Byline: CRAIG SMITH 

Composer Ron Strauss has the same last name as some other tunesmiths, including opera master Richard Strauss and the several members of the Strauss waltz dynasty. He's also one "s" away from operetta magician Oscar Straus. But he's definitely his own man

and musician.

Strauss studied theater at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh and composition and piano in Philadelphia, and after a vigorous career as a composer, arranger, and accompanist in San Francisco and New York, he moved to Santa Fe in 1986. A revised version of his 2001

opera Queen of the Night received a staged reading -- though staged singing is perhaps a better term -- in 2007 as part of the Garson Theatre Company's focus on new works, and he has written music for the Santa Fe Symphony Orchestra and Santa Fe Community Orchestra. Serenata of Santa Fe has performed a number of his pieces and in 2008 recorded his Tangos de Santa Fe and Matapolvos. The disc was released by Strauss earlier this year.

Strauss' music again comes to the fore on the first concert

of Serenata's 2009-2010 season, and it's a world premiere: Five Pieces of the Puzzle for oboe, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, double bass, and piano. The other slated repertoire for the concert, which takes place on Sunday, Sept. 13, at the Santuario de Guadalupe, is Francis Poulenc's 1962 Sonata for Clarinet and Piano and Paul Hindemith's 1924 Die Serenaden for soprano, oboe, viola, and cello. The performers are Serenata regulars: soprano Gail Springer, oboist Pamela Epple, clarinetist Keith Lemmons, violinist Kerri Lay, violist Elena Sopoci, cellist Dana Winograd, double bassist Aaro Heinonen, and pianist Debra Ayers.

"The title came after the piece, because I didn't know what to call it while I was writing it," Strauss said. "The pieces [movements] did follow one after the other, as I was writing them, and there are sort of references from one piece to be found in another. At some point, I realized the themes I was using, the melodies, could have had an entirely different life. They could have developed very differently.

So by calling it Five Pieces of the Puzzle, I suggest it could go on.

It's not an ending of the ideas."

Strauss chose the rather unusual instrumental combination because of the creative liberty it offered. On the other hand, he says, "I wanted to do something with piano. I've done piano duets and piano trios with violin and cello. Aaro said that this is basically [Schubert's] 'Trout' quintet with the added winds. I think oboe and clarinet are two of the most expressive instruments in terms of range and expression, and I thought it would make a little mini-orchestra piece."

Most of the instruments in Puzzle get chances to shine in solo passages, Strauss said, but not every one. "Piano is my first instrument, but you know, I kind of shortchanged the piano in this piece. It only has a few opportunities to shine. It's often used as a percussion section for keeping the rhythm fluid. I guess the bass got a little shortchanged, too."

Despite its solo moments, Strauss was reluctant to call Puzzle a

concerto, whether a modern ensemble concerto or a small-scale concerto grosso on the Baroque model. "I wasn't interested in the solo aspect so much. I was thinking about the type of melodic gestures

I wanted to make. I was interested in how a melody can be transformed by context, by setting, rather than by changing intervals. They [recurring melodies] wear different costumes in different movements. Sometimes there's one very harsh [musical] moment that elsewhere is heard

very softly; you probably wouldn't recognize it unless you knew

it was coming."

Like Matapolvos, Five Pieces of the Puzzle is a multimovement

work that adds up to about 30 minutes -- a considerable length

for a chamber-music work. But Strauss made sure each movement

has a definite beginning and ending, rather than feeding into the next without pause. "I think of them as little memories, so something you heard before may come back into the puzzle. I think life is like that.

You have all these experiences. Sometimes they are in patterns that happen and recur; you recognize them and think, how do I remember this? How is it different?"

Strauss is strictly a pencil-and-paper composer when he starts out, though he does use the Finale score-writing program to complete his scores and to print out copies. "Many of the melodies in this piece I had written down in notebooks as musical ideas that had occurred to me

over decades and had never found a place in pieces. Or that I had never

taken time to develop. There is something here from high school!

I 'invited' them to parley together and see what happened. In the process, new ideas came, and I let them all determine the form of the movements, rather than deciding [in advance] what I was going to write."

Additional Serenata concerts this year, all at 3 p.m. in the Santuario, are an all-Bach afternoon on Oct. 25; music of Mozart, Poulenc, and Brahms on Nov. 15; and a program to be announced for the winter solstice on Dec. 22. Final plans for 2010 concerts are pending but will include the return of double bassist and composer Peter Askim and works of Saint-Saaens and Ravel in May.

details

Serenata de Santa Fe: A Blissful and Tender Melodic Journey

3 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 13

Santuario de Guadalupe, 100 S. Guadalupe St.

$25, $20 seniors, $10 students, $5 children 6-18, $1 under 6;

call