Music Reviews : Novelty Overloads 2nd Chamber Festival Event

If the Chamber Music/LA Festival opened this year with familiar music, the second concert proved overburdened with novelty. The closest thing to standard repertory, Thursday at the Japan America Theatre, was Brahms’ Horn Trio.

That was the redemption of the evening in the assured, balanced effort of hornist Richard Todd, violinist Nina Bodnar and pianist Doris Stevenson.

The first half was marked by the introduction of the harpsichord to the festival. Kenneth Cooper even had a solo spot, where he offered the bravura buzz of Ligeti’s “Continuum,” and three pieces from Bartok’s “Mikrokosmos.”

A Quintet in E-flat by Haydn proved implacably ordinary, despite intriguing instrumentation and structural ideas. Todd and Brad Warnaar played its horn flourishes and filler suavely, in cooperation with Cooper, violinist Yukiko Kamei and cellist Tsuyoshi Tsutsumi.

Cooper’s transcription of Bach’s arrangement of a Vivaldi violin concerto made Stokowski’s symphonic elaborations of Bach’s music seem eminently tasteful, stylish and reasonable in comparison. Coarse execution, particularly the stuffy sound and misintonation in Tsutsumi’s and violist Milton Thomas’ frenzied passagework did not help the misguided cause, anchored by Kamei and Cooper.