MUSIC REVIEW : Harrell and Famous Friends Play Chamber Music at Wiltern

The benefit recital for the USC School of Music Tuesday night was supposed to be “very special.” It said so right there in the program.

Lynn Harrell, the mellow cellist with the heroic temperament and current occupant of the Piatigorsky Chair at USC, was going to play trios with a couple of stellar friends.

The visiting violinist would be Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, whose extraordinary gifts and compelling persona have already been celebrated on “60 Minutes” and “The Tonight Show.”

The pianist would be Brooks Smith, a USC faculty stalwart and, in palmier days, formidable accompanist for Jascha Heifetz.

The program was to survey two cornerstones of the repertory: Beethoven’s noble “Archduke” and Brahms’ ultra-romantic B-major Trio, Opus 8.

Success seemed a foregone conclusion. Unfortunately, it wasn’t.

The concert didn’t take place on the USC campus. For this glamorous occasion, the university travelled to the renovated Deco-kitsch splendors of the Wiltern Theatre, a 2,300-seat movie palace that now houses operas, dance events and rock concerts.

There’s the rub. The Wiltern looks and feels far too cavernous for the intimacies of chamber music. And it sounds awful.

The acoustics definitely do odd things to delicate musical impulses. If this proved disorienting to the non-capacity audience, it must have been maddening to the artists. One wondered what they could hear of each other on the stage.

From a center seat in Row K, just under the balcony, the sound in the Beethoven remained blurry and balances went askew. Harrell’s cello thumped and rasped with a mighty fuzz. Salerno-Sonnenberg’s violin tone, unexpectedly thin and

soft-grained, all but evaporated. Smith’s piano emerged loud, shrill and tinny.

One could savor a nicely etched phrase here, a deft exchange of melodic ideas there. For the most part, however, the ensemble work seemed tentative, intonation proved problematic and precision in bravura passages turned out to be very unreliable.

Under the circumstances, it was difficult to know where to blame the musicians and where the hall.

Matters improved somewhat after intermission, when the program turned to Brahms and this listener moved to a seat in the nearly empty balcony. The sound enjoyed increased presence, greater definition, more clarity upstairs, and, at this juncture, the music-making seemed better focused.

One still could note certain inequities in style and technique. But one also could appreciate the communal air of rhapsodic urgency, lyrical generosity and dramatic flair.

There was little wrong here that might not be cured with fine tuning. Or a more hospitable locale.