Music and Dance Reviews : Rare Mozart From L.A. Chamber Orchestra

For many observers, the important bonus in this Mozart year has to be the many opportunities to hear unfamiliar Mozart works, rarities seldom revived but on display now, in this season of celebration.

Semi-rarities there are on the fifth and final program of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s Mozart minifestival, being given this week. At the first performance, Wednesday night in Ambassador Auditorium, guest conductor Helmuth Rilling--as deeply authoritative and refreshingly modest as ever--succeeded in demonstrating all their virtues.

The Cantata, “Davidde Penitente,” is an acknowledged masterpiece some Mozarteans have not heard. In Rilling’s illuminating reading--the term is used loosely, since he so often, as here, conducts without score--the work’s greatness was documented in ways large and small.

A chorus of 41, called, appropriately, the L.A. Chamber Orchestra Chorus (trained by Gordon Paine), sang vigorously but with careful attention to niceties of tone and style. Not all of Da Ponte’s words--this was the work which launched the Mozart/Da Ponte collaboration--emerged clearly, but the musical line and all possible dynamic nuances, became followable and cherishable.

The orchestra, operating at a lean roster of 39 players, produced similarly disciplined and transparent playing, Rilling shaping an irresistibly linear performance.

The three soloists--sopranos Donna Brown and Ibolya Verebics (the former from Canada, the latter from Hungary) and tenor Scot Weir--added luster to this glowing performance.

Verebics in particular, in a role which demands much at both ends of a range wider than two octaves and considerable ease in florid passages, swept all before her. The sound is beauteous, the control remarkable. Hers is a name to remember.

The first half of this evening warmed up both performers and audience neatly.

The chorus, reportedly made up of Southern California veterans of Rilling’s Oregon Bach Festivals, sang nicely, if somewhat timidly, in the outbursts of “Venite populi,” an unfamiliar piece so brief it caught the LACO audience by surprise at its conclusion.

The centerpiece of this event became the Symphony No. 33, given as stylish, affectionate and handsomely polished a reading as any Mozartean might wish.

This program will be repeated in Royce Hall at UCLA, tonight at 8, and back in Ambassador Auditorium, Saturday at 8:30 p.m.