Music Review : Sabine Meyer With Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra

When last heard here, in the fall of 1982, Sabine Meyer was a member of the Berlin Philharmonic, playing a series of concerts under Herbert von Karajan at Ambassador Auditorium.

Seven years later, Meyer, now a free-lance clarinetist--in a well-publicized dispute between the late Karajan and the members of the Berlin orchestra, she was not retained--returned to Ambassador as soloist with Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra on Wednesday night.

Playing concertos by Stamitz and Weber, and assisted by LACO music director Iona Brown and the ensemble, the 29-year-old Meyer showed again the splendid, faceted virtuosity and personable musicianship that made Karajan her partisan. As attractive as they are, Stamitz’s Third, and Weber’s First, Clarinet Concertos do not usually cause audiences to applaud for minutes after their performance. Meyer’s playing did.

She achieved this through a combination of effortless but unmistakable accomplishment, well-honed technical skills, a varied palette of sound and an irresistible musicality.

In Meyer’s performance, the joys in Stamitz’s Classically proportioned B-flat Concerto remained within the bounds of style, while clearly projecting many nuances of feeling. And the early Romantic, deeply impassioned F-minor Concerto of Weber--a work justifiably beloved of the clarinet clan--brought out even more telling, articulate elements in the soloist’s musical arsenal.

At the beginning of the program, Brown led 20 players of the LACO roster through a bright, tight, tidy and elegant reading of Handel’s Concerto Grosso in A, Opus 6, No. 11. At the end, there was more stylishness in an anticlimactic run-through of Haydn’s Symphony No. 44.