Music : Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra at Wiltern

The Friday concert by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra at the Wiltern Theatre saw Iona Brown, violin in hand, back in her director’s chair after having entrusted the orchestra to traditional baton-wielding conductors for a few weeks. And, for the first time this season, she never left that chair to assume the role of soloist.

That function was fulfilled by Barry Tuckwell, the supreme master of the horn--an artist whose technical skills and interpretive acuity continue to grow and to astound more than a quarter-century after he had seemingly exhausted the expressive and mechanical possibilities of the instrument.

In Richard Strauss’ youthful E-flat Horn Concerto, one could savor the solidity and infinite variety of the Tuckwell tone at all volume levels, admire his fearless range-roving and the pointedness of his attack. And in the sublime Romanza of Mozart’s Concerto, K. 447, be transported on a seamless legato of incomparable, voluptuous warmth.

Orchestrally, however, things went less well in both concertos. The Strauss, which adds a hefty wind contingent and timpani to the strings, proved dense rather than rich in louder passages (to say nothing of the biggest climaxes)--somewhat of an undifferentiated lump, in which individual strands could not be readily discerned and in which the strings were decidedly overbalanced.

Brown, busily playing the violin, was able to provide little here beyond the occasional, presumably purposeless, wave of the bow. The conclusion to be drawn is that rehearsals were less than exhaustive.

In the lightly scored Mozart, scrappy violin ensemble rather than balance and clarity proved disconcerting but failed to compromise Tuckwell’s effort. Happily, the problem was restricted to the opening movement, after which cohesion and suavity prevailed for the remainder of the concerto and throughout Schubert’s Fifth Symphony, which brought the program to its conclusion.

Brown and her orchestra produced crisply elegant Schubert: transparent in texture yet substantial in tone, briskly paced and with a lacing of rhythmic tension to complement what in more casual interpretations can seem a surfeit of Schubertian amiability.

The boss was absent from the stage for the evening’s first offering, Gounod’s praline-sweet “Petite Symphonie” for nine winds.

While the Gounod score hardly demands the listener’s attention, one had to have ears of basest tin not to respond to the grace and dexterity with which it was projected by flutist David Shostac, oboist Allan Vogel, clarinetist Gary Gray, bassoonist Kenneth Munday, hornist Richard Todd and their hardly less gifted colleagues.