Music and Dance Reviews : Kremer’s Mozart Meddling Gets Messy

That more can be less proved true again Tuesday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, where Gidon Kremer and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie completed their survey of the Mozart violin concertos.

The problem was not just that there were more concertos--Nos. 2, 3 and 4--but that Kremer’s interpretive additions in larger doses began to seem like subtractions. The fine and intriguing qualities of Monday’s offering were still present in abundance: a vigorous, virtuoso expansion of the style, strong dance connections and roots in Baroque tradition.

Robert Levin’s cadenzas were again short and generally stylistically pertinent, including a particular gem in the first movement of No. 4. But all the other tinkering, altering scoring and articulation, and for the soloist even pitches, began to sound more like niggling perversity than re-creative illumination.

Kremer and Levin hit crude bottom in the first movement of the Concerto in G, a thing of bumptious exaggeration. Then the violinist turned right around and offered noble lyric simplicity in the sublime adagio. Consistency was clearly no hobgoblin for Kremer.

Kremer also turned around literally, and all too frequently. Kremer in the middle of the conductorless band did more bobbing and pivoting than Lakers forward Sam Perkins in the low post. The violin being a very directional instrument, this introduced a lot of now-you-hear-him, now-you-don’t effects, not always--or even often--appropriate.

Monday, revisionist Mozart was balanced by large offerings from Arthur Lourie. The countervailing force Tuesday was left to visionary contrapuntalism from Berg and Beethoven. Kremer clearly valued his program structure, and stalked offstage when an influx of latecomers made a prolonged agony of finding seats between the first two pieces.

Although thus rudely detached from the ensuing Mozart, Berg’s short canon “Alban Berg an das Frankfurter Opernhaus” made a pungent ear appetizer, as arranged by Schnittke for solo violin and strings. Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge” offered the young German band a chance to show its great musical zeal and ensemble skill, apparent throughout the evening in alert accompaniment.

In encore Kremer turned to Arvo Part’s “Fratres,” in a radiant, quietly ecstatic version for strings and percussion, and a quirky adaptation of the “Winter” Largo from Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” with the attention on the witty, double-timed accompaniment of principal cellist Michael Mueller.