Music Reviews : Orpheus Chamber Group Performs at Royce Hall

What one took away from the Sunday afternoon concert at Royce Hall by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra was, refreshingly, what was performed rather than who was performing it.

The fact that the 26-member ensemble functions without a conductor relieves us of the distractions of comparison shopping--Maestro X’s Mozart vs. Maestro Y’s--to give us the illusion of being in the presence of Mozart’s Mozart.

Sunday’s program offered, in unfashionably logical chronological order, four powerful works, each executed with elevated professionalism.

The overture took the form of Haydn’s lusty Symphony No. 85, (“La Reine”), played with irresistible vigor. Subsequently, Mozart’s sublime Sinfonia Concertante, K. 364, may have proven a bit rocky in the outer movements, with transitions less than ideally smooth. But all involved--not least the sweet-toned soloists, violinist Todd Phillips and violist Maureen Gallagher, both drawn from the Orpheus ranks--melted hearts in the poignant slow movement.

Two contrasting 20th-Century works completed the agenda: Samuel Barber’s spare, spikily neo-Baroque “Capricorn Concerto,” in which the concertino was brilliantly taken by flutist Susan Palma, oboist Randall Wolfgang and trumpeter Chris Gekker, and Shostakovich’s flailing, crushingly pessimistic “Chamber Symphony,” an arrangement by Rudolf Barshai of the 1960 Eighth String Quartet.

The Shostakovich, delivered with knife-edge clarity and soulful eloquence, proved the ideal recessional, sending the listener, downcast but nourished, into the soggy Westwood evening.