MUSIC REVIEW : English Chamber Group Suffering Identity Crisis

The English Chamber Orchestra, which made its local debut at Civic Theatre on Wednesday night, failed to give a single clue to its national identity.

Austrian orchestras display their velvety warm timbre, for example, and French orchestras usually specialize in the music of their fellow countrymen. But the 33-member London-based orchestra under conductor Pinchas Zuckerman sported a generic, international sonority and offered no British music on its eclectic but unadventurous program.

The concert’s first half proved unimpressive. Zuckerman, who performed both as conductor and soloist, exploited his more bankable talent in two Beethoven Romances for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 50 and Op. 40.

His fiddling was sufficiently energetic and thoughtfully phrased, but without conviction. The orchestra responded dutifully, but then these Romances are, of course, minor-league Beethoven.

Under Zuckerman’s foursquare direction, Dvorak’s lofty, bucolic Serenade for Strings in E Major remained decidedly earthbound. One would think that with a violinist of Zuckerman’s caliber on the podium, the orchestra’s strings would shimmer with a cogently unified blend.

In the Dvorak, however, the violins exhibited a hard-edged sound and blurred their demanding descending passages.

Fortunately, the orchestra redeemed itself after the intermission. In Paul Hindemith’s austere but moving “Trauermusik” (“Music for Mourning”), Zuckerman’s rich, incisive viola solo made an excellent foil to the hushed, exquisitely balanced strings. Orchestra and conductor could not have been more sympathetic to the composer’s neoclassical aesthetic.

The English ensemble pirouetted through Mozart’s ubiquitous Symphony No. 40 in G Minor, ignoring the work’s customary Sturm und Drang choreography. Zuckerman’s light touch elicited a buoyant, consistently lyrical response from his players, and their transparent, subtly nuanced second movement was a paragon of Mozartean virtues.