Music Reviews : Iona Brown, Chamber Orchestra Play Mozart

One-composer programs can be as incoherent as agendas made up of the efforts of a half-dozen different hands, as witness the Mozart program offered by Iona Brown and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra on Wednesday at Ambassador Auditorium.

The evening began with the festive brilliance of the opening allegro of the “Paris” Symphony, tautly, faultlessly executed. In a misguided attempt at historical re-creation, however, Brown opted not to follow with the remainder of the symphony, holding that for evening’s end.

Thus, the second item was the sweetly placid “L’amero saro costante” from “Il re pastore,” its stratospheric tessitura holding no terrors for soprano Evelyn de la Rosa, with Brown supplying the elegant, eloquent solo violin obbligato.

It was back to Mozart writ large with his grand and deep C-major Piano Concerto, K. 503, in which Barry Douglas proved an indifferent Mozartean, his interpretation lacking even such minimal concessions to 18th-Century style as participation in the tutti (he was disconcertingly idle during the longest of the composer’s concerto introductions), decorating repeats and fleshing out the left-hand part.

More importantly, his hyper-clean reading lacked the rhythmic freedom encountered with increasing frequency among performers on modern as well as period instruments. It was odd to hear in the slow movement the sensitively molded phrases of flutist David Shostac and oboist Allan Vogel so bluntly answered by Douglas.

Brown provided herself a flashy solo opportunity with a couple of bleeding chunks from the “Haffner” Serenade, whereupon De la Rosa returned with the concert aria “Alcandro, lo confesso”--its coloratura convolutions and upper limits effortlessly (for the most part) negotiated, its drama muted.

The evening ended, as noted, with the remainder of the “Paris” Symphony, the finale hurled out with the high-velocity clarity of articulation that is a particularly compelling aspect of Brown’s Mozart--and which is likely to be sorely missed when she takes leave of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in 1992.