Two Chamber Evenings With the Institute

Time was well spent in Schoenberg Hall at UCLA on Friday and Saturday with members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute and some of its distinguished faculty.

The need to display as many facets of the Institute Orchestra as possible on Friday did, however, occasion some inapt programming. The ear-shattering (in Schoenberg Hall’s intimate acoustic), lugubrious Funeral Music by Grieg was expendable, the obvious technical finesse of its trombones-and-tuba executant ensemble notwithstanding.

A more compelling work than Hindemith’s dated, lumpishly witty second “Kleine Kammermusik” would have permitted greater appreciation of the patently accomplished quintet of young wind players assembled for the occasion.

And Three Tangos by Erik Griswold (b. 1969), for a percussion ensemble that also did lots of hand clapping, seemed aimless on first encounter.

But the same percussionists launched Friday’s event with a brilliant effort on behalf of John Cage’s “Construction No. 2”--an attractively sonorous exercise subtly combining jazz inflection with gamelan-like instrumentation.

Also on Friday, with super-professionals Jaime Laredo as first violinist and Lynn Harrell the first cellist, respectively propelling and anchoring an ensemble otherwise comprising first-rate string players from the Institute pool, Mendelssohn’s evergreen Octet soared, sailed and thrilled.

The following evening’s opener, Dvorak’s Serenade for Winds, needed more work. Its delivery by an Institute band emerged rough in execution and often unbalanced, with the angular leadership of conducting fellow William Eddins blunting the composer’s lyricism and squaring off his dance rhythms.

Before Dvora’s Piano Quartet, Opus 87, two of its participants, Harrell and pianist Misha Dichter, offered a brief master class in the form of the slow movement of Rachmaninoff’s G-minor Sonata.

The quartet itself took a while to coalesce. Once it did--with Harrell’s intoning of the slow movement’s luscious theme, his playing marked by a stunning display of the dying art of expressive portamento--the evening hurtled to a grandly satisfying conclusion.

Dichter proved an alternately fiery and elegant presence in conjunction with Harrell, the splendidly thrusting violin of Sheryl Staples and Eleanor Liao’s warm viola.