MUSIC REVIEW : County Chamber Orchestra Puts on the Dog for Orange Concert

The Orange County Chamber Orchestra closed its Sunday concert with a bow. Two bows. Actually, two bow-wows. They were listed in the program, along with musical personnel, under Hunde: Kaela, die Hunde Principal; and Bruno. And, though the orchestra and the day’s featured guests Jeanne and Sidney Weiss gave their polished all, it was a dog day afternoon at St. Joseph Center in Orange.

The occasion for Kaela and Bruno’s contributions was Leopold Mozart’s “Hunt” Symphony, a good-natured romp that sports an opening movement full of barking hounds and gunshots (in this case, cap-gun shots from toy rifles wielded by jungle fatigue-clad marksmen). But for this performance, presumably remembering the adage that animal acts are hard to follow, music director Micah Levy swapped this movement with the closing minuet.

The chamber orchestra backed Papa Mozart’s shenanigans with implacable elegance and a dignity that belied the hilarity yet to come. Horns--Jon Titmus, Mark Adams, Diane Muller and Kurt Snyder--handled the obligatory parallel calls in the first and third movements with admirable control of intonation and ornamentation even after the workout they had just finished in Handel’s Concerto for Two Choirs.

The horns had already met the challenge of typical Baroque stratospheric lines in Handel’s showcase for antiphonal wind ensembles. Here, the wind choirs--led by oboists Peter Scott and Marni Hougham, hornists Titmus and Muller, and bassoonist David Muller; answered by Kathy Del Russo and Electra Reed, oboes, Adams and Snyder, horns, and Andrew Kline, bassoon--conversed in crisp, energetic dialogue. Scott, in particular, distinguished himself with a stylish, engaging oboe solo in the Larghetto section of the third movement (which Levy led as an Allegretto contrast to the movement’s introductory Andante).

In contrast to the clean, light balance that marked the second half of the program, Chausson’s Concert for Piano, Violin and String Quartet was muddled by performance with string orchestra rather than quartet. By exploiting pretensions to concerto status, this arrangement sacrificed the inherent transparency of chamber music, exchanging, for example, ponderous bottom lines for what should have been lush, dark underpinnings.

Moreover, the replacement sent the soloists into unfortunate competition with the strings. In the Sicilienne, Jeanne Weiss’ piano was lost while Sidney Weiss’ violin fought for supremacy in what is otherwise a lilting, poignant song. And while far from insensitive to interpretive demands, the Weisses proved themselves ill-matched for this work by contrasting a wide Romantic violin sweep against a too-delicate pianism.