Music and Dance Reviews : David Keith Leads L.A. Mozart Orchestra at Ebell

Since its first public performance in 1976, David Keith’s Los Angeles Mozart Orchestra seems to have gone through several incarnations. In its latest, the peripatetic ensemble opened a 1988-89 season in Wilshire Ebell Theatre Saturday night.

Before a festive, sizable audience, Keith and his two-dozen-plus players offered promising performances of a program devoted to works by Gluck, Mozart and Haydn. Promising is probably the right description, because this group of musicians may not be the same one that performed under this name in previous years.

Musical solidity and stylish details continue to mark the results Keith elicits from his willing and competent young ensemble. The players make the most of contrasts, usually blend well and often achieve sound balances; their status as a resourceful, emerging orchestra is clear.

At the same time, it would be premature to claim that Keith’s band can compete with more established, genuinely accomplished Southern California ensembles, one of which--Ami Porat’s Orange County-based Mozart Camerata--gave a similar program in Santa Ana just five weeks ago.

Still, Keith’s careful, nicely detailed reading of Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony, though not the final word on orchestral finesse, moved along convincingly and indicated the range of the composer’s emotional facets. And his conducting of the Dance of the Furies, from “Orfeo ed Euridice,” began this concert in a compelling way.

At mid-concert, violinist Kathleen Lenski and violist Janet Lakatos were the handsomely matched, musically articulate and effortlessly virtuosic pair of soloists in the ubiquitous Sinfonia Concertante, K. 364. Keith & Co. provided secure and nuanced collaboration.