OVERNIGHT REVIEW: Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and Music Director Jeffrey Kahane open new season

By Robert D. Thomas
Music Critic
Pasadena Star-News/San Gabriel Valley Tribune/Whittier Daily News
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Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra; Jeffrey Kahane, conductor; Wiek Hijmans, electric guitar
Mozart: Magic Flute Overture; Osvaldo Golijov: Sidereus; Derek Bermel: Ritornello (for electric guitar and orchestra); Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major
Sunday, Sept. 25, 2011 • Royce Hall (UCLA)
Next concerts: Oct. 15 (Alex Theater, Glendale) and 16 (Royce Hall)
Information: www.laco.org
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It seems like it was only yesterday when a young, curly haired pianist/conductor became the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s fifth music director, but Jeffrey Kahane (pictured right) — with a little less of the curly hair and a lot more experience — began his 15th season as LACO leader with concerts this weekend at Glendale’s Alex Theatre and UCLA’s Royce Hall. Before Sunday’s performance, Principal Oboist Alan Vogel, speaking on behalf of the orchestra, praised Kahane’s musical and personal qualities and said, “This is the ‘Golden Age’ of LACO.”

The qualities that make d LACO one of the nation’s finest chamber ensembles and Kahane’s penchant for building eclectic programs were both on display Sunday night. He led a superbly played evening bookended by two of classical music’s benchmarks that surrounded the west coast premiere of two contemporary pieces. All four works were gems, played splendidly.

The program began with not one but two overtures: a crackling, sparkling, precise reading of Mozart’s Overture to The Marriage of Figaro, followed by Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov’s Sidereus.

The latter was a complicated commission for Golijov because it came from 35 orchestras of different sizes who asked for an overture-like piece to honor Henry Fogel, former president and CEO of the League of American Orchestras. The title refers to a 1610 treatise, Sidereus Nuncis, by the astronomer Galileo and records his early observations of Jupiter, our moon and stars through his telescope.

According to Christine Lee Gengaro’s program note, Golijov said the opening should be “ominous, massive, suspended in time and space.” That’s exactly how it sounded, in part because Kahane emphasized the deep sonorities by seating the trombones and tuba stage right, just behind the violins and close to the front of the stage. It was an unusual seating plan but one cannily gauged for this piece, which turned out to be engrossing in both its construction and sonic effects; one could easily imagine this overture being used in some future deep-space-themed movie.

The other premiere was Ritornello (for electric guitar and orchestra) by Derek Bermel, who is completing his three-year stint as LACO’s composer-in-residence. Wieck Hijmans journeyed from the Netherlands to play the work, the eighth time in five months that he’s played the 14-minute piece. It begins with a catchy little cadenza that sounds as if Andres Segovia had been exhumed to play an amplified guitar. That’s the first of three cadenzas — the final one allows Hijmans to exercise his heavy metal, rock and roll proclivities to interesting, albeit somewhat weird effect — and the work ends as quietly as it began with the same catchy tune that harkens back to the Baroque era. Hijmans was scintillating as the soloist; Kahane and the orchestra accompanied skillfully.

After intermission, Kahane was the soloist and conducted from the keyboard in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4, a work that he has played often with LACO — the first time was in 1989, eight years before he became the orchestra’s music director. Since then he has played and conducted the piece three times and led André Watts in another performance.

As far as I’m concerned, Kahane — who celebrated his 55th birthday two weeks ago — can play and conduct this work as often as he wants if he and LACO can match last night’s scintillating performance. Kahane’s crystalline tone focused on clarity and he made the piano an integral part of the ensemble, which responded last night with perfectly couched chemistry (so together are Kahane and his colleagues that he appeared not to be conducting at all at the beginning of the second movement, sitting motionless as if in meditation). The cadenzas (written by Beethoven) and the ultra-fast third movement gave Kahane plenty of chances to demonstrate his virtuosity but what impressed me the most was the entire sense of a community making music.

As if to emphasize that collegial spirit, Kahane encored not with a solo piece but with the Adagio Assai movement of Ravel’s G Major Piano Concerto; he and his colleagues gave it a sensitive, elegant reading. As Alan Vogel said at the concert’s beginning, this is, indeed, a golden age for LACO.
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Hemidemisemiquavers:
• One of the pleasures of attending a concert are the erudite program notes and the material contained in the printed booklet, which includes the orchestration, estimated duration and LACO’s performance history with each of the pieces. Other ensembles would do well to emulate what I could consider to be an important part of attending a concert.
• Although I wasn’t able to attend because I was traveling from the Rio Hondo Symphony concert (LINK) to Royce Hall, another plus to LACO concerts are the preconcert lectures, which, in this case, featured Kahane, Bermel and Hijmans.
• Beethoven — in this case, the Symphony No. 3 (Eroica) — is also on the agenda for the Oct. 15 and 16 concerts. This was one of the symphonies with which Kahane sought to broaden the audience’s understanding of what a “chamber orchestra” could play (i.e., not just small, Baroque works). The program also includes Canadian soprano Karina Gauvin as soloist Britten’s Les Illuminations, Op. 18, and Now sleeps the crimson petal.
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(c) Copyright 2011, Robert D. Thomas. All rights reserved. Portions may be quoted with attribution.

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