MUSIC REVIEW : Karr Guests With Mozart Camerata at Performance in Newport Beach

More than a few orchestras in the last couple decades have discovered a particular equation: the addition of Gary Karr as soloist equals a sure-fire success almost regardless of what else goes on.

Saturday night at St. Andrew’s Auditorium, conductor Ami Porat hedged his bets, sandwiching the renowned double bassist’s appearance with the Mozart Camerata between a Mozart overture and a Beethoven symphony. This was all to the good, because Karr, besides being in splendid form, was also in an especially frivolous mood on this occasion.

Following a stylish, graceful “Cosi fan tutte” Overture characterized by first-class woodwind playing and initial chords grave enough for the opening bars of the “Zauberflote” Overture, half the orchestra left the stage. A small ensemble remained to accompany guest artist Karr in two favorite bravura pieces that fall into the musical category that Sir Thomas Beecham dubbed “Lollipops.”

In his own transcription of a Violin Sonata in A, credited to Henry Eccles but really by Valenti or Matteis, Karr demonstrated his familiar virtues: big, warm, mellow, steady, pitch-true sound matched by remarkable musical intuition and expressivity, uncommon in general, pearls beyond price on the string bass.

In Karr’s arrangement of Paganini’s Introduction and Variations on the bass aria (that’s the human bass) “Dal tuo stellato soglio” from Rossini’s “Mose in Egitto,” there were a legato, a grand line, a perfect trill and a pianissimo we’d be lucky to get from an opera singer nowadays, not to mention a nonchalant virtuosity that vanquished any challenge with ease.

In the Variations, the man positively carried on (or Karried on!). He vamped the audience a la Marilyn Monroe, lifted his leg before downbeats as if on “Hee Haw,” draped his left arm limply over the bass to indicate “boredom” (but never missed an entrance, of course) and hit the maestro’s music stand with his bow during a vehement prestissimo passage; Porat “timidly” moved self and stand to the side. Fears that Spike Jones horn effects might ensue were fortunately unfounded.

After these shenanigans, the Camerata’s crisply articulated, supple, bracingly energetic reading of Beethoven’s First Symphony was both relief and anticlimax. Hardly anything readily follows Gary Karr at his manic best.