Music and Dance Reviews : Pianist Pires in Debut With Chamber Orchestra

Saturday’s concert by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra under Iona Brown’s direction at Ambassador Auditorium was a loving tribute to familiar Mozart: the omnipresent Piano Concerto in C, K. 467, and the Symphony in E-flat, K. 543.

The absence of routine was assured by the presence in the concerto of a slight, 40ish Portuguese pianist named Maria Joao Pires, making a West Coast debut that carried with it an air of something quite special.

Pires is not a scholarly Mozartian. It was, in fact, startling to hear the piano’s unprepared entrance in the finale, without the runs that pianists today routinely interpolate to flesh out what can seem a rather blunt episode.

More important was the keen-edged intensity and solid, focused tone Pires brought to the score. This was playing which combined rhythmic thrust--notwithstanding judiciously applied rubatos, to keep the melodic line flexible--with rapt lyricism. Pires provided her own thoughtful cadenzas, beginning that in movement one with a striking quotation from Beethoven’s C-minor Piano Concerto. On its own, in the Mozart symphony, the LACO offered a taut, witty and finely detailed reading of a sort one is unlikely ever to hear from an orchestra that makes its living playing Brahms and Mahler.

And if anyone can doubt that Brown’s string-playing expertise and experience have not had a hugely positive effect on her charges, the confirming evidence was there in the airily delicate balance achieved by the strings in the symphony’s slow movement.