Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra Performs a Hum-drum Mozart and a Delightful ‘Mozartiana’
- Timothy Mangan
- 25 minutes ago
- 4 min read
REVIEW: An uneven evening sees LACO falter in Mozart but recover with a lively “Mozartiana” and a thoughtful new work by Christopher Cerrone.
Why is Mozart so difficult to play? Musicians will tell you that it is so. Musicians, and listeners, will all have their theories, but no one really has a satisfactory answer. Performers who think they have the answers will apply them to whatever Mozart piece they’re performing and it will fall dead as a rock. The situation is truly puzzling.
I have my own theories, no doubt just as wrong as the others, but I’ll share them anyway, in brief. Dear musicians, please don’t try to help Mozart along. His music is perfection. It doesn’t need your help. What it needs is for you to attend to the musical values of the piece at hand — things like instrumental balances, tempos, tonal beauty, ensemble cohesion and the rest. When you have a musical score by Mozart in front of you, cover up his name or substitute another, lay away all your theories and misperceptions and start from there.
But that is not all. In your pursuit of Mozart’s perfection, don’t be precious, or emotive, or merely technical. Don’t force anything. But allow the expression to emerge from your pursuit of the musical values of its performance. Mozart must be warm. He must have energy. But these properties aren’t applied by you. They are in the music and you must discover them with your science.
Which is to say that the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s performance of Mozart’s Symphony No. 35, “Haffner,” at Segerstrom Concert Hall Thursday night, was not all it could be. It opened this season-ending Philharmonic Society concert with a strangely indifferent account, strangely because all the notes seemed to be in place, and the will to play them also.
But upon closer aural examination, things were a little bit askew. Those dreaded instrumental balances were off (more woodwinds, please), so that Mozart’s conversational interplay was muffled. An overall tonal warmth was also lacking. The sound was bright, at times brittle.
Music director (since 2019) Jaime Martín pushed and pulled at the poor thing, too, jabbing at the accents, busily fashioning phrase shapes and details, losing cohesion in the trees. This “Haffner” never quite settled into a Mozartian flow. It wasn’t that bad. Nor was it memorable.
What a difference was heard in the second half. It was more Mozart, in fact, but this time there was another name atop the score: Tchaikovsky. This seems to have done wonders for the players, who relaxed and performed the piece with charm galore.
Tchaikovsky’s “Mozartiana,” a bit of a rarity in the concert hall (all but overwhelmed with his symphonies), is an orchestral suite made up of arrangements of little-known Mozart piano pieces, plus his choral “Ave verum corpus.” It is delicious from first note to last.
But why was it played so much better than the “Haffner,” with sweetness and light, a sense of fun and finesse, jauntiness and pace? One might say that Tchaikovsky was a better orchestrator than Mozart — I admit to considering it for a minute — but that would be stupid.
No, I assert, the players simply had Tchaikovsky in their minds, rather than Mozart (at least to a degree), and were unburdened by their theories. Tchaikovsky was more comfortable to them. You could hear it, for sure, and you could also see it. Martín was making considerably less effort on the podium and allowed the music to dance and sing.
Along the way, concertmaster Margaret Batjer and clarinetist Joshua Ranz contributed radiant solos.
In between the Mozarts, the world premiere of Christopher Cerrone’s “Selah,” a concerto for violin, cello and chamber orchestra, was given. (The concert is scheduled for repeats on Saturday at Zipper Hall in Los Angeles and Sunday at the Wallis in Beverly Hills.) In this new work, the American composer, 42, has combined aspects of minimalism, Baroque style, contemporary dissonance and sonic experimentalism to produce an accessible and communicative work.
What it communicates, exactly, is a little confusing, despite (or maybe because of) the long explanation in the program book and the additional comments by the composer from the stage. No matter. Much music is hard to explain. Suffice to say that “Saleh” is a 25-minute work that features two soloists who trade and spar with a simple theme while an active orchestra mirrors and reverberates their doings as equal participants rather than accompanists.
The simple theme is no toe tapper, but it provides the listener, with its consistent repetitions and fragmentations, a sense of solid ground amidst the complexities that ensue. You don’t feel lost during “Saleh.” The soloists generally start each section (there are five movements played without pause) in a duel of sorts, offering short bursts of activity, echoing each other quickly. These bursts coalesce into a minimalistic thrum, which in turn becomes pockmarked with syncopation. Overall, the music moves from darkness to light, from dour to optimistic. Cerrone, who often uses electronics, but not here, has orchestrated it with imaginative variety.
The soloists, violinist Anthony Marwood and cellist Coleman Itzkoff, slashed and sawed effectively, though the work, which certainly must be hard enough to play, doesn’t leave a listener admiring their virtuosity. It’s not exactly a display piece.
The encore (after “Mozartiana”) was a lickety-split account of the Overture to “The Marriage of Figaro,” too short and quick to evidence much of a Mozart problem.
LOS ANGELES CHAMBER ORCHESTRA
With: Jaime Martín, conductor; Anthony Marwood, violin; Coleman Itzkoff, cello
When: May 14
Where: Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall
Presenter: Philharmonic Society of Orange County
