Music Reviews : Brown Leads Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields

Iona Brown directed another of her ensembles, a core string contingent from London’s Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, on Wednesday at Ambassador Auditorium in what the headline writers used to call a varied program. Veteran observers might, rather, refer to it as a tour program: one in which the players trot out well-worn favorites, covering a variety of stylistic bases, inviting you to compare their way with them to everybody else’s. Musical comparison-shopping, so to speak.

Brown elicits from the Academy a leaner, more pointed sound than that of her Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Still, a common attention to detail provides similarities, having largely to do with homogeneity and balance. These Brown obtains by refinements of ensemble preparation outside the realm of big-band conductors: e.g., the uniform amount of bow used by each player and the care lavished on the violas, whose relatively frail tone simply drops out of the sonic picture when not attended to. It should be noted that the Academy’s matched pair, Anthony Jenkins and Robert Smissen, “sounded” splendidly.

Wednesday’s program offered the D-minor Concerto from Vivaldi’s “L’Estro armonico” and the Bach E-major Violin Concerto, both with Brown the commanding, fluent soloist; Janacek’s early, uncharacteristic and soporific (pace Andrew Shulman’s sweetly sensitive cello solo) Suite for Strings; Britten’s “Simple Symphony” (in need of a long holiday); and, most enliveningly, Stravinsky’s hazard-strewn Concerto in D for Strings, its rhythmic complexities and tenuous balances more nearly conquered in the Academy’s wittily insinuating interpretation than by any one else and at any time within memory.