Review: A little traveling music for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra

If you had to pin a theme upon the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s season-opening program at the Alex Theatre Saturday night, it wouldn’t be “Beethoven 5,” as the program book simply called it. A more fitting one would have been “Travel.”

First came a journey to Australia with Brisbane-born, now L.A.-based composer Cameron Patrick, then a rarely-performed piano concerto from that inveterate traveller Camille Saint-Saëns, and finally a trip back home, as it were, to the very core of the classical repertoire, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

Beethoven was there to pull the people into the tent, but the other pieces found music director Jeffrey Kahane creatively refreshing the usual overture/concerto/symphony agenda.

Patrick’s piece, “Lines of the Southern Cross” – a world premiere LACO commission – was a fascinating 19-minute tone poem for strings and percussion. Framed by a prologue and an epilogue, the three linked interior movements were supposed to evoke the topography and atmosphere of Lake Cootharaba and the K’Gari Coast on the eastern shore north of Brisbane and the barren Nullarbor Plain in the southern outback.

At the pre-concert talk, Patrick said that he considered using a didgeridoo in the score, but owing to the shortage of available virtuosos on that aboriginal instrument, he settled for a drone motif for cello and double bass. That turned out to be the key to the piece’s appeal; the drones drew the listener in for long stretches of stillness as the strings worked out and sparingly applied percussion instruments rattled, sizzled and boomed.

From the perspective of someone who has never been to the outback, “Southern Cross” succeeded in evoking the vast spaces, loneliness, danger, and weirdness of what one imagines it to be like. Patrick works in film, and it shows here, yet this piece can serve both as background music and something to get absorbed in.

Then Kahane and Finnish pianist Juho Pohjonen took on Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No. 5, subtitled “Egyptian” because the composer wrote it while vacationing in Luxor. Barnstorming virtuosos who like big Romantic showpieces are overlooking a beauty here because this concerto is flashy, tuneful, ultra-lush, and toward the end of the second movement, offbeat, as Saint-Saëns suddenly ventures eastward to Asia.

With an excellent Steinway under his fingers, Pohjonen shaped and floated his part with clarity and point, and the distinguished chamber-scaled backing kept Saint-Saëns’s more sentimental impulses under wraps. Pohjonen added Couperin’s “Les Chinois” as a French-Asian encore.

It remained for Beethoven’s Fifth to rush by in brisk, brusque jolts – made even more abrupt by the Alex’s dry acoustics – as the LACO managed to stay with Kahane’s lightning tempo at the end.