Music Reviews : New York Soloists at Doheny Mansion

Listening to chamber music in concert halls around town, it is easy to forget some of the more subtle pleasures of hearing it in a small setting.

Thus, after members of the New York Chamber Soloists entered the Pompeiian Room of the Doheny Mansion, oboist Melvin Kaplan offered commentary before the players settled down around a floor lamp in the center of their audience.

Be the atmosphere ever so appropriate, however, this Chamber Music in Historic Sites concert had problems. The New Yorkers--the quartet on Friday, violinist Hamao Fujiwara, violist Ynez Lynch, cellist Alexander Kouguell and Kaplan, is only a part of the complete group--proved middling performers much of the time, skittish in intonation, hardly exemplary in ensemble.

In Mozart’s Duo for Violin and Viola, K. 423, Fujiwara played with the brightness and bravura of a performer in an auditorium, while Lynch followed meekly. Though not acknowledged, Beethoven’s Variations on Mozart’s “La ci darem” was written for two oboes and English horn, not the oboe, violin and viola of this loose reading.

Similarly, not only was the B-flat Oboe Quartet the group performed most likely not by Haydn--Kaplan made a mild disclaimer--but its catalogue number, Hob. II:4, was incorrect.

Though not altogether satisfyingly executed, nevertheless Beethoven’s String Trio, Opus 9, No. 1, emerged spirited and robust. Mozart’s cherishable Oboe Quartet, K. 370, wound up the program, graciously led by Kaplan’s dainty, pointed melodicism.