MUSIC REVIEW : Sergiu Comissiona Returns to Chamber Orchestra Podium

Pleasantly festive, the new year’s program by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Sergiu Comissiona over the weekend, started off the decade promisingly.

Most promisingly, it confirmed what we have long known: that on its better nights, the chamber orchestra makes splendid music for its guest conductors.

Returning to this podium after some years away, Comissiona put together an interesting agenda of middleweight works, one without a high point, but one which nevertheless proved more or less engaging.

Dvorak’s gorgeous “Czech Suite” can stand on its myriad beauties, and it certainly shows off any ensemble as accomplished and authoritative as the L.A. Chamber Orchestra. Except that he erred on the side of control--as opposed to spontaneity--Comissiona elicited handsome playing and viable performances from the orchestra.

At the other end of the program, the Romanian-born conductor’s leadership of Beethoven’s complete incidental music to Goethe’s “Egmont” proved sensible and effective. Still, at no point did it convince the experienced listener that to revive this historically interesting but merely serviceable music is justifiable.

The overture, we know, deserves its place and familiarity among the composer’s artifacts. The rest is second-rate, fragmented and of no great moment. If a soprano soloist already engaged to sing important music on another part of a program asks to sing these two forgettable ditties, an accommodating conductor might acquiesce. But otherwise, why?

In the event, and at the second of three weekend performances, Saturday night at Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena, it all went smoothly, though the overture lacked compulsion, and the fragments focus. Some conductors have tied together these snippets with dramatic readings; that might have helped. In the two songs, and with an apparently ordinary voice, American soprano Karen Smith Emerson made a fleeting impression of competence.

Ursula Oppens, on the other hand, conquered all before her in the West Coast premiere of the Piano Concerto by Joan Tower. Tower’s eclectic, post-modern (read: classical new age), two-year-old concerto is bright, tight, amusing and virtuosic; it holds the interest in every moment, at least on first hearing. How it will sound at second and third auditions, one cannot predict. One would give it those chances, however.

In any case, it made a hit with the demanding Pasadena audience, and found Oppens, Comissiona and Tower happily exchanging hugs during the bows.