MUSIC REVIEW : Rare Works at Season’s End

The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s final program of the current season--this reviewer attended Wednesday’s performance, the first of two at Ambassador Auditorium with a third offering scheduled for Royce Hall Sunday--found guest conductor Helmuth Rilling leading two rarely heard works: Bach’s “Hunting” Cantata, BWV 208, and Mozart’s incidental music to “Thamos, King of Egypt,” K. 345.

Bach’s youthful secular cantata is a celebration of the hunt, the principal pursuit of the Saxon duke for whom it was written.

Bach’s characterization in the recitatives is particularly sharp, but the ensuing arias tend to be commonplace--with a single exception. Still, the listener could delight in the expert handling of their tortuous pitches and endless fioriture by a crack team of vocalists: sopranos Henriette Schellenberg and Ibolya Verebics, tenor Jonathan Mack and baritone Daniel Lichti. High marks too to the floridly imaginative harpsichord continuo of Patricia Mabee.

The exception previously referred to is the justly popular aria known in English (the entire program was sung in the original German) as “Sheep may safely graze,” delivered with exquisite poise and purity of tone by Schellenberg accompanied by the sweetly tootling recorder duo of Lisette Rabinow and Scott Wilkinson.

If Bach had the evening’s big tune, Mozart walked off with overall musical honors for his “Thamos” choruses and orchestral interludes, brimming with harmonic invention, thunderous drama and thematic prefigurings of “Die Zauberflote,” whose plot also bears resemblances to that of “Thamos.”

Rilling led the score with blazing conviction while his pickup chorus (prepared for the occasion by Gordon Paine) sang with admirable strength and clarity of tone.