MUSIC REVIEW : Perick, Chamber Orchestra Battle the Elements

It wasn’t the mighty but vicissitudinous Los Angeles Philharmonic having trouble at Hollywood Bowl on Wednesday.

It was the modest but usually splendid Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Sometimes less is less.

Taking over the huge, ball-laden stage in the shell under the stars for the second time ever--and for the first time since 1982--the Chamber Orchestra seemed a bit lost.

Perhaps the players missed their music director, Iona Brown. Perhaps they had been denied sufficient rehearsal.

Perhaps they were discommoded by the cool night air, the vast open spaces, the tinny amplification system or the 9,239 empty seats in the 18,000-seat amphitheater. Perhaps they were distracted by the incessant, polytonal, anti-Mozartean beeping of a car-alarm in the parking lot.

Perhaps they resented having their little night-music eclipsed by the moon.

Whatever the reason, they mustered only a mildly pleasant, oddly inconsequential concert.

Christof Perick, the celebrated guest conductor from the Deutsche Oper in West Berlin (where his last name happens to bear only one syllable), did what he could to sustain momentum and grace. Given the size of the ensemble at hand, he had the good sense to strive for lyrical persuasion rather than dramatic coercion. Nevertheless, much of the music-making seemed tentative in purpose and rough in execution.

The evening began with a dutiful traversal of Mozart’s “Zauberflote” overture.

After the throat-clearing, Perick and friends turned to the wonders of Mozart’s E-flat Sinfonia Concertante for winds and strings, K. 297b. This was intended, no doubt, to showcase four stalwarts of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra: Allan Vogel (oboe), Gary Gray (clarinet), Kenneth Munday (bassoon) and Richard Todd (horn).

The obviously noble intentions were initially compromised by technical mishaps and procedural blemishes. In the final Andantino, however, soloists and orchestra achieved the wonted fusion of serenity, unanimity and virtuosity.

After intermission, the mini-ensemble invaded customary Philharmonic turf, venturing Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony. One can make a good argument for an intimate approach to the not-necessarily-lofty rhetoric. Ideally, however, such an approach would entail more subtlety of nuance, greater transparency of texture and a higher rate of precision than Perick and the Chamber Orchestra could muster here.

This was a nice, muted, generalized performance. Despite the reduction in scale--or, more likely, because of it--one had hoped for a little more.