By Nestor CASTIGLIONE

Next week’s recital at the Glendale Noon Concerts will comprise a pair of chamber works by composers who, to some degree or other and for varying reasons, never quite fit into the mainstream.

Played by violinist Nancy Roth and pianist Lorenzo Sanchez, it will open with the “Poema de una sanluqueña” (“Poem of a Girl from Sanlúcar de Barrameda”) by Joaquín Turina and the “Violin Sonata No. 2” by Charles Ives.

Though his idiom is soaked in the setting Mediterranean sun of post-Romanticism, Turina has been overlooked by his more famous Spanish colleagues, such as Albéniz and Falla.

“It’s hard to say why this is,” said Sanchez. He suggested that perhaps it was the composer’s comparatively more introspective idiom as well as the scope of his work that precluded wider fame.

“Either way, it’s gorgeous music,” he continued. “When we were offered this concert, we said that we had to do this piece.”

Ives, on the other hand, found himself largely isolated from the mainstream for most of his life because of his willful defiance of European expectations of how music ought to be constructed and sound. An insurance man by day, Ives would return home and work late into the night on his visionary scores that were unlike any European music being composed at the time. His “Violin Sonata No. 2,” arguably his most popular chamber work, evinces many of these qualities. A work that the composer declared later was wrought out of “old ragtime stuff,” the piece incorporates a panoply of montage-like quotations from folk music, patriotic songs, and even from Ives’ own music. Those elements led Sanchez to liken the work to the work of Carl Stalling, the longtime composer for the Looney Tunes shorts.

“That cinematic quality comes to my mind whenever I listen or perform [Ives’] music,” he explained. “It’s music that seems to jump from scene to scene. There are instances when he’s showing you something; then – bam! – a sudden left turn and, before you have a moment to adjust, he tosses another sharp turn with something else going on.”

Those sudden turns find their echo in the program itself, composed as it is of music by two composers with widely diverging styles. A challenge, certainly, but one that Sanchez explained that both he and his chamber partner, Nancy Roth, relish.

“She’s a great musician and [an] even greater person,” Sanchez went on. “I’ve been playing with her for years, and it’s been nothing but an amazing partnership. She’s all about the music.”

Nancy Roth and Lorenzo Sanchez will perform their program of Turina and Ives on Wednesday, Aug. 16 at the Glendale City Church on 610 E. California Ave., corner with Isabel Street, from 12:10 p.m. to 12:40 p.m. As with all Glendale Noon Concerts, admission is free. For more details, please go online to www.glendalenoonconcerts.blogspot.com or call (818) 244-7241.

  Nestor CASTIGLIONE