MUSIC REVIEW : Orpheus Ensemble at Pavilion

The conductorless (by choice) New York-based Orpheus Chamber Orchestra presented a hugely nourishing concert on Monday in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the first of its two appearances there this week as part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Mercedes-Benz Celebrity Series.

Orpheus opened with a little-known symphony of Joseph Haydn: No. 78, in C minor, music that can never make up its mind whether to be cheerfully entertaining, which it nearly always is, or skittishly moody, which it is in its dark opening movement and in several surprising instances thereafter.

The 20-odd players dispatched it with sparkle and cohesiveness--and a degree of dynamic variety that might be the envy of any conductor-drilled ensemble. It also proved to be a triumph of ensemble cool over some extraordinary audience shenanigans:

--A ripple of unwelcome applause following each of the first two movements;

--An irate listener rising from his seat, loudly chiding the resident troglodytes for ruining his evening, then noisily exiting the auditorium, shouting out a few ironical farewells as orchestra and audience wriggled embarrassedly;

--After the third of the symphony’s four movements, yet another clappy aberration.

Los Angeles obviously isn’t ready for Haydn.

Elgar’s plaintively delicate String Serenade soothed savage breasts (and restless hands), being set forth so relaxedly that it all but evaporated in the vast reaches of the Pavilion.

But Copland’s spiky “Short Symphony” of 1933 (a decade before Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements, which it wittily presages), in an arrangement for chamber orchestra by Dennis Russell Davies, proved a splendid tonic, being punched up with terrific energy and ferocious glee in conquest of its rhythmic exigencies.

Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante, K. 297b, brought the program full Classical circle, its solos played with supreme elegance by oboist Randall Wolfgang, clarinetist David Singer, bassoonist Steven Dibner and hornist William Purvis.