MUSIC REVIEW : Jeffrey Tate Conducts English Chamber Orchestra in Pasadena

The air was chilly outside Ambassador Auditorium, Pasadena, and within as well, where the English Chamber Orchestra presented the first of its three UK/LA ’88 Festival-related concerts on Thursday.

The indoors chill related to the orchestra’s playing: balanced and tuned to a fault under its principal conductor, Jeffrey Tate, who was making his local debut.

Had the conductor relaxed his grip on the musicians just a mite in the ubiquitous (this season) “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis” of Vaughan Williams, more of its sensuous sheen, its monumental ebb and flow might have been projected.

What emerged instead was a somewhat starchy, dynamically blunt reading of severely muted passions.

Richard Strauss’ Oboe Concerto, written when that composer was past 80, showed orchestra--which, it should be noted, is on the last leg of a grueling American tour--and conductor loosening up somewhat.

Tate provided sensitively gauged support for the soloist, ECO principal Neil Black, whose slender, penetrating, vibratoless tone and unassuming virtuosity went a long way toward obviating Strauss’ meanderings and rather forced jollity.

The program finale took the form of the Beethoven Violin Concerto, with soloist Frank Peter Zimmermann--a poised 23-year-old newcomer from Germany who possesses all the technique in the world and a solid, pure, middleweight tone that carries remarkably well.

This was a levelheaded, tasteful--rather than soaring and risk-taking--interpretation, but one which never lapsed into blandness.

Zimmermann played (superbly) the splashy first-movement cadenza of Fritz Kreisler, more sane but hardly less overbearing than that of Soviet avant-gardist Alfred Schnittke, which figured in Gidon Kremer’s performance of the same concerto when the ECO last appeared here, in 1983.