MUSIC REVIEW : Iona Brown, L.A. Chamber Orchestra Think Big at Wiltern

“The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra is just the right size to make listening to music a personal and intimate experience.”

That statement, printed in the program booklet, was part of the official greeting from Deborah Rutter, executive director of the orchestra, Friday night at the Wiltern Theatre. The sentiment wasn’t exactly prophetic.

The musical agenda on this occasion--generous samplings of relatively hefty Mozart, Beethoven and Mendelssohn plus a foray into timid academic modernism--wasn’t what one usually associates with the current performing style of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. This, you will recall, is the modest ensemble that employs a music director--Iona Brown--who intermittently fiddles while intermittently conducting. Under the potentially grandiose circumstances, one could not always count on a very personal experience.

The Wiltern, you will recall, is a glitzy 2,300-seat Art Deco cavern that used to house movies and vaudeville. Here one certainly could not count on an intimate experience.

The dangers and limitations built into this concert were obvious. Still, Brown came up with some intriguing compensations.

She doesn’t actually do a great deal on the stage. She takes the seat normally reserved for the first violinist, waves her bow when not otherwise occupied, plays along when she feels the urge or need (the observer is never quite sure which it is), and bobs her head either to convey rhythmic vitality or to enforce mass precision. For all we know, she also transmits cogent messages to her unequal peers with minute eye signals.

The system probably works better for taut Baroque challenges than it does for loose romantic adventures. Still, it can work for both, after a fashion--so long as one doesn’t demand a lot of interpretive nuance or spontaneity.

Obviously, careful preparation is the most crucial prerequisite for success. Brown must devote a lot of rehearsal time to adjusting balances, perfecting dynamic subtleties and polishing the gentle art of the unison phrase.

The evening at the Wiltern opened with a brisk and graceful performance of Mozart’s Symphony No. 15, K. 124. Brown kept everything in tidy order and logical motion.

The evening ended with the lilting, patently overfamiliar flourishes of Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony, fastidiously articulated. Significantly, perhaps, the director--she doesn’t call herself a conductor--joined her fellow violins in the introductory pluck, but then devoted most of her considerable energies to playing self-effacing maestra.

The centerpiece of the program brought Bella Davidovich back for her seventh vehicle with the orchestra: Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto. As usual, she performed most intelligently, with fluency, brio and decent restraint. Brown was able to provide reasonably attentive, reasonably flexible accompaniment. It was fine, as far as it went.

Here as elsewhere, however, at least one ingrate out front felt a nagging frustration. He kept wishing that this talented musician would just put down her fiddle, stand up and really conduct.

A genuine stand-up conductor apparently was deemed necessary for the West Coast premiere of Fred Lerdahl’s “Waves” (1989). In this modest but complex exercise, Brown relinquished leadership to Larry Rachleff of USC, who dispatched his duties with conventional aplomb.

The 46-year-old composer from the University of Michigan contributed his own written annotations as well as a rather halting and redundant verbal introduction. Nevertheless, his mellifluous busymusic could stimulate only perfunctory enthusiasm in the vast open spaces.