MUSIC REVIEW : CHAMBER ENSEMBLE AT ‘NEW’ FORD

The John Anson Ford Theatre has endured a checkered past.

When it opened in 1922, as the Pilgrimage Playhouse, it provided a happy al-fresco home for religious dramas at Easter time. Eventually it became a sometimes popular, sometimes obscure locale for sporadic Shakespeare productions, diverse dance events, jazz orgies and chamber-music concerts.

For a while, long ago, Heifetz and Piatigorsky made beautiful music together there. For a while, not too long ago, it served as the official intimate adjunct--or, if you will, antidote--to Hollywood Bowl, across the freeway in Cahuenga Pass.

Until its timely demise, the Los Angeles Ballet danced there, sometimes with stellar friends.

In recent seasons, activity dwindled at the lovely, 1,100-seat amphitheater on the hill. The Philharmonic folk lost interest. Sight lines for dance proved problematic. So did sound lines at concerts, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert having to compete with increased traffic on the land and in the air.

Now, with a little help from the County and Supervisor Edmund Edelman, the Ford is trying to make a comeback. The first installment, a sophisticated trio of chamber-music concerts arranged by the cellist Robert Martin, was delivered this weekend.

New walls have been raised, presumably to reduce the intrusion of street noise. Landscaping has been revised. Most important for devotees of the lyric muse, Abe Meltzer has designed a new acoustical shell for the open, verdant, tree-lined stage.

It isn’t like other shells. It consists of a bank of panels, wooden at the bottom and plexiglass at the top. The musicians play in front of the bank, beneath a second unit of plexiglass reflectors that serves as a canopy.

At the opening concert Friday night, the shell exerted considerable appeal of its own. The transparent planks afforded a view of the tiered garden at the rear while, at the same time, mirror images of the players danced on the glassy surfaces. The Augenmusik was intriguing.

Given the intrinsic problems of metropolitan music-making in an outdoor setting, the shell turned out to be a sonic success too. It projected the natural sound forward, with maximum presence and minimum distortion. The bass response may have seemed a bit exaggerated, but the fundamental resonance and clarity remained extraordinary, even at seats at the extreme sides and in the most distant rows.

The only serious distractions involved a blinking beacon at the top of the hill above the stage (which can be turned off) and the roar of cars, trucks and planes (which, drat the luck, cannot).

Under the quirky circumstances, hearing music at the Ford these nights is like hearing a high-fidelity recording that happens to have a lot of surface noise. One gets used to it.

For the Beethoven Septet, which comprised the first half of the inaugural program, Martin assembled--and joined--a distinguished bi-coastal ensemble of specialists: Hiroko Yajima (violin), Samuel Rhodes (viola), David Young (bass), James Kanter (clarinet), James Thatcher (horn) and Michael O’Donovan (bassoon).

They opted for a mellow, subtle, essentially subdued perspective of the miraculous score. That probably was just as well, because Yajima’s violin tended toward stridency under pressure.

After intermission came the sweeping charms of Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet. The propulsive performance was dominated by the pianist, Cynthia Raim. A former student of Rudolf Serkin and Mieczyslaw Horszowski at Curtis, she disclosed extraordinary flair and sensitivity in her Los Angeles debut.