Guitarists, composers finally compare notes

Because USC’s Thornton School of Music has long been fertile ground for both classical guitar and compositional interests, a concert in which “Thornton Guitarists Meet Thornton Composers” makes good sense, a natural blend of available resources. Tuesday’s program was the first of a few collaborations between the Thornton School and the Skirball Cultural Center, and it proved rich in both concept and execution.

Players included faculty members James Smith and Brian Head, as well as such alumni as Scott Tennant and William Kanengiser, who have gone on to fame in the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet and on their own. All guitarists involved winningly performed music of Head (the jazz-hued, slightly dissonant lark of “Brookland Boogie,” for example), Donald Crockett (including the intriguing, varied miniatures of “Falcon’s Eye”), James Hopkins and the late Robert Linn (his “Forward, Inward, and Afterward” is a bold and bittersweet guitar duet deserving wide attention).

The concert’s centerpiece was only partially concerned with guitar, per se. Imaginative and crafty composer Stephen Hartke presented both the short, eloquently murmuring solo guitar piece “Un tout petit trompe-l’oreille” and the evening’s largest work, the odd, moving and witty 1996 chamber piece “Sons of Noah: Lost Chapters from the Bible.” Scored for the strange, and strangely effective, instrumentation of three quartets -- guitars, bassoons, and flutes (doubling on piccolos) -- the piece involves cooperative sonic factions, often snugly tethered to pulse-driven rhythms.

The text, by Philip Littell, is a satirical treatise on post-Noah land greed, avidly sung here by soprano Lisa Stidham. It also benefits from a cryptic solemnity and also topicality, in an age of topographical malaise.