Music Reviews : Cellist’s Local Debut Sparks Concert

Friday’s otherwise workaday concert in Royce Hall by Iona Brown and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra was distinguished in its final segment by the presence, in his local debut, of an immensely gifted young British cellist named Steven Isserlis.

Isserlis’ calling card was Joseph Haydn’s C-major Concerto, which he delivered with dancing rhythmicity, a light, bright, perfectly focused tone and secure intonation. There could be nothing but delighted reaction to his enthusiastic, puppyish stage presence.

Brown, directing from the principal violin position, and her charges framed Isserlis’ effort energetically but without the ensemble cohesiveness the orchestra has recently achieved under Christof Perick’s baton.

Haydn was also heard on the first half of the program, his dashing Symphony No. 43 in E-flat (“Mercury”) marked on this occasion by sensitive execution of the plaintive Adagio but compromised by a breathless, coarsely executed finale.

The evening’s best orchestral work came in the opening selection, a gravely dignified--at times daringly slow--reading of the Concerto in G minor, the “Christmas” Concerto (reference to the historically sanctioned sobriquet was avoided, studiously it seemed, in the printed program), from Corelli’s Opus 6, featuring Brown’s authoritative solo violin and the subtly enhancing harpsichord continuo of Patricia Mabee.

The post-intermission portion of the program signaled the arrival of the League of Stentorian Coughers, which had evidently sent some top operatives to sabotage (with total success) the ethereal slow movement of Elgar’s Serenade for Strings and to fire some particularly resonant shots during the most rapt moments of the Haydn concerto, intrusions that, to judge by his startled facial expressions, were not lost on the soloist.