Music Reviews : Viennese Fare at Chamber Music Fest

“Music From Vienna” may not be the most imaginative theme for a chamber music festival, considering how much of the standard repertory comes from that city and its traditions. But artistic director Yukiko Kamei has managed some inventive programs for the five concerts of the seventh annual Chamber Music/LA affair.

The opening agenda, presented Sunday afternoon at the Japan America Theatre, was not one of them, however. Even before Kamei replaced Brahms’ Sextet in G with the same composer’s earlier Sextet in B-flat the lineup was a comfortable one, long on familiar pleasures.

Which, of course, does not make it unwelcome, particularly in the warm, generally enlivening readings by the festival forces. A large Mother’s Day audience was treated to consistently generous sounds and spirits across the chronologically arranged repertory.

Violinists Paul Rosenthal and Kamei, violists Marcus Thompson and Milton Thomas and cellists Ronald Thomas and Nathaniel Rosen closed the concert with a persuasive account of Brahms’ Opus 18 Sextet . They left the first movement rather under-energized, but came to compelling agreement on the phrasing and power of the variations, and brought stylish zest to bear on the rest of the piece.

Rosen made a showcase of interpretive devices out of the cello version of Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata, accompanied with quiet elegance by pianist Edward Auer. he provided a rich sonic base for his explorations, and developed the bravura elements with wit as well as technique.

Auer’s contributions moved into the foreground with Haydn’s Trio in E minor, but there they proved often square, digitally deft but stylistically and rhetorically blunt. Kamei and Ronald Thomas offered agreeable, balanced but undistinctive expositions of the string parts.