MUSIC REVIEW : L.A. Chamber Orchestra Opens Its 20th Season at Two Venues

With a distinguished guest conductor on the podium, a world premiere performance as its overture and the prestigious Beaux Arts Trio as its soloist, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (LACO) opened its 20th season in two locations over the weekend.

Led by Christof Perick--who will also conduct the orchestra in the Music Center Opera pit next month in Mozart’s “Cosi fan Tutte”--the now-veteran ensemble gave a tight and graceful performance at Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena Saturday night.

Beethoven’s “Pastorale” Symphony closed the program in a solid, linear and balanced reading, made articulate by Perick’s gentle urgings and viable by smooth interactions between strings and woodwinds. All that was missing in this stylish performance was the full gamut of instrumental dynamics; perhaps a longer rehearsal period. . . .

At the other end of the agenda, Stephen Hartke’s “Pacific Rim,” a new work written on a commission to celebrate the LACO anniversary, also proved to be bucolic, but self-consciously so.

An air of disingenuousness seems to hang over the pleasant-sounding, neo-Bartokian piece, 11 1/2 minutes in length, and a busy workout for the players. Cowbells might give the work a sense of place, geographically, if cowbells were not a world-wide artifact; at least these cowbells seemed to keep the action out of doors.

The climax of this program was reached at its middle, in a definitive and hair-raising performance of Beethoven’s Triple Concerto by the Beaux Arts Trio--pianist Menahem Pressler, violinist Isidore Cohen and cellist Peter Wiley (who last season replaced the retiring Bernard Greenhouse).

Pressler’s outrageous mugging aside, the three soloists achieved as compacted and telling, as songful and virtuosic a reading of this familiar work as one may ever expect to hear.

Ensemble statements became monuments of sense and meaning; single notes, perfect gems of communication. For nearly two centuries, analysts and critics have been calling the Triple Concerto uneven; they obviously did not have the advantage of hearing the Beaux Arts Trio advocate this witty, irresistible work. Perick and the chamber orchestra collaborated gamely.

The Chamber Orchestra performed at the Wiltern Theater on Friday night.