Music / Dance Reviews : Iona Brown Debuts With LACO

Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “The Lark Ascending” is not the type of piece that generally elicits rousing ovations and curtain calls--at least not in Southern California. Saturday night in Ambassador Auditorium it was, and rightly so, as played by Iona Brown.

For at least one listener, Brown’s music directorship of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra--which concluded with the weekend’s season-ending concerts--seemed made up of such performances. In “The Lark Ascending,” typically and fittingly, she took double duty as soloist and conductor, and it would have taken a hard heart indeed (and a tin ear besides) not to have been moved by the intensity and beauty of her solo flights here.

To open, she had chosen another, potentially soporific, Vaughan Williams work, Five Variants of “Dives and Lazurus,” but she gave its pervasive mellowness pointed direction and strong feeling.

In between came the West Coast premiere of Marc Neikrug’s “Chetro Ketl,” co-commissioned by LACO and led (authoritatively) by composer-in-residence Donald Crockett.

Named for a prehistoric Pueblo Indian village in which a single, many-roomed building housed the entire population of 1,000, “Chetro Ketl” adopts the village’s structure for its own, with numerous small motifs repeated and combined to form the whole.

The brevity and bold, distinctive colors of these motifs make for accessible listening, the lightness of the scoring assuring comprehension of intricacies in texture and argument. In an eclectic style (Lutoslawski, Stravinsky and Varese are clearly in the mix) and concluding with a building ritual dance, the 12-minute work proved engaging, though modestly so, on initial acquaintance. The orchestra played it crisply.

With baton in hand, Brown concluded with a dashing, forceful and, in spots, wonderfully delicate reading of Mozart’s Symphony No. 39. A long standing ovation ensued.