MUSIC REVIEW : Mozart Camerata at Santa Ana High

You’ve heard the one about the silk purse and the sow’s ear. Sunday afternoon, Ami Porat and the strings of the Mozart Camerata neatly transformed the decidedly non-glamorous auditorium at Santa Ana High School from the latter into the former.

These accomplished musicians vanquished negative effects of unlikely surroundings and attendant acoustical anomalies via the most straightforward means: glowing, stylistically elegant, splendidly accurate playing from first note to last.

Sweet, warm, mellow, deliberately slender tone graced Mozart’s “Serenata Notturna” (buttressed by timpani) and Rossini’s Sonata for Strings No. 5, with richness and depth conjured effortlessly for the more feverish subjectivity of three works of the late 19th Century.

Porat’s arrangements turned Verdi’s String Quartet, Puccini’s “I Crisantemi” (also originally a quartet) and the Adagio movement of Tchaikovsky’s string sextet, “Souvenir de Florence,” into showpieces for two dozen instruments.

His forces provided that brand of high-caliber ensemble playing embodying one of music’s paradoxes: Each string group performed as if one voice (even the notoriously difficult Allegro of the Verdi), disguising the individual virtuosity that makes such precision possible.

Felicities abounded: in Mozart, the perfect unison pizzicati; in Verdi, the exquisite final sostenuto chord of the Andantino--superb attack and release, with string basses real bulwarks to the original cello pedal point--and the long-sustained trill in the Scherzo (hard enough for a lone violinist, breathtaking when done by a crowd).

Puccini’s piece now seems a “Manon Lescaut” medley, since the thematic material was reused later in that opera. Regardless, its sweeping, mournful lines were limned in unified songfulness.

Violinists Peter Marsh and Alex Horvath and violist Misha Zinoviev contributed ripe tone, technical dexterity and emotional relevance to important solos. Cellist Armen Ksadjikian suffered occasional intonation problems and smudged difficult Rossini passage work but did a polished turn in the Tchaikovsky.

Porat’s subtle, very particular direction eschewed ostentation, creating the flattering illusion that these musicians could have played the program with no conductor.