Cellist Nathaniel Rosen Joins Mozart Camerata for Haydn Concerto in Santa Ana

One could hardly be surprised at the warm welcome given Nathaniel Rosen at Santa Ana High School on Saturday evening. After all, the California-born cellist, who a decade ago captured the gold medal in the Tchaikovsky Competition, has brought his consistently accurate, inspired music-making to Southland audiences dozens of times during the past quarter-century.

His vehicle on this occasion was Haydn’s D-major Concerto. The 40-year-old cellist played with warmth and vibrancy and produced a soaring, heroic sound. The arching lyricism of the adagio attested to his acute musical sensitivity, and the fleet-fingered buoyancy of the finale aptly displayed his facile technique. Intonation remained at all times exact, although his tone experienced some momentary inconsistencies.

Under Ami Porat’s baton, the Mozart Camerata provided reliable, if not especially articulate, support. The auditorium seemed to diffuse the sound more than usual; even the soloist’s passage work lost some clarity. A bank of stage lights proved a distraction for the audience during the finale, although the musicians seemed not to notice.

Following intermission, Porat and the Camerata achieved a reasonably clean, ebullient reading of Schubert’s Fifth Symphony. Some fine playing from a crack string section and a full-bodied wind sound helped give the allegro movements a strong sense of motion. Inner voices sang with considerable charm in the elegantly flowing andante. Porat seems to have difficulty in maintaining a steady tempo, and one can imagine that the young conductor might not be the easiest baton-waver to follow. During the last movement his orchestra experienced some rhythmically shaky moments.

But there was nothing shaky about the ensemble’s crisp, assertive rendering of a movement from Mozart’s Divertimento in B-flat, K. 137, which served as the second encore. The first was a sloppy performance of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.”