MUSIC REVIEW : Iona Brown Leads L.A. Chamber Orchestra at the Ambassador

Displaying most of the virtues of her ensemble, Iona Brown, music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, returned to Ambassador Auditorium, and the group’s subscription series, Saturday night. Her aggressive program reached a climax in a genuinely showy performance of Mozart’s “Haffner” Symphony.

Leading from the concertmaster’s chair, Brown presided over a bright but handsomely contrasted and usually transparent reading of the Symphony No. 35, one which surveyed its exuberant peaks as well as its meditative plains. If the violinist-director’s penchant for conducting from a seated position remains controversial, the brilliant Mozartean results that she and her highly accomplished colleagues achieved in this performance could not be faulted.

Nor could one complain about the impressive overture to this program, the string sextet from Richard Strauss’ “Capriccio,” as played by violinists Brown and Ralph Morrison, violists Roland Kato and Laura Kuennen and cellists Douglas Davis and Nils Oliver. As a sound experience, and for its integrated musical flow, this reading occupied a high plateau.

Samuel Barber’s ubiquitous Adagio for Strings became less touching and less cohesive, if similarly lush in the ear; perhaps it needs a conductor shaping its progress with two fully involved hands. This time around, its emotional points seemed flattened out.

At mid-program, fortepianist Steven Lubin, game but undistinctive, offered a competent, largely uncharacterized run-through of Haydn’s D-major Concerto that did nothing to enhance the reputations of either performer or composer. Brown & Co. remained alert.