MUSIC REVIEW : Soloists Show Russian Roots

The founding of the Baja California Chamber Orchestra is worthy of a cheerfully illustrated children’s book. Eduardo Garcia Barrios, an eager young Mexican conductor, decides to start an orchestra in a sleepy seaside town in Baja California. When he cannot find the requisite musicians locally, he contacts his buddies in far-off Russia, where he had studied conducting at the fabled Moscow Conservatory, and invites them to come to Mexico to form his new orchestra.

The Russians gleefully accept, leaving their freezing climate and endless queues for an idyllic life in sunny Baja, where they teach youngsters by day and serenade their parents by night. It’s too soon to pen an “and they lived happily ever after” ending to this uplifting tale. Besides, some of the Russian musicians who came to Ensenada in 1991 have already become disillusioned with the enterprise and left the fledgling ensemble.

When the group performed in Tijuana’s Cultural Center in July, it numbered 15. When Garcia Barrios and his crew played Friday night in Sherwood Auditorium, their first U.S. appearance, the ensemble was down to 12 players.

Among them are some first-rate soloists, including violinist Igor Chechko, oboist Boris Glouzman and clarinetist Vladimir Zontag. Despite their fluency, it was indeed odd to hear no music for chamber orchestra played all evening. The program consisted of seven pieces for various chamber ensembles. Perhaps the conductor should rename his group the Baja California Chamber Soloists.

Chechko and Glouzman provided the principal spark to the program--opening with F Major Trio Sonata by G. P. Telemann. Although their ornamentation was somewhat sparse by current Western performance standards, they animated the work’s angular counterpoint with briskly articulated phrases and bright, crisp sonorities.

It took a while to become accustomed to the ensemble’s basso continuo of electronic harpsichord, harp, cello and contrabass--harpsichord and cello would have been properly 18th-Century--but this creative adaptation of a Baroque convention worked reasonably, especially since no one was playing a period instrument.

Five of the ensemble’s woodwinds played a charming arrangement of Anatoli Liadov’s orchestral suite Eight Russian Folk Songs. The five Russian players stylishly and sympathetically evoked these spirited peasant dances and dolorous laments, all colorfully decked out by Liadov in mildly exotic modal harmonies. The quintet displayed that reedy, buzzy sound Russian woodwind players cultivate, although the substitution of a bass clarinet for the customary French horn robbed the quintet of the velvet, non-reed timbre that helps homogenize the sonority of a typical woodwind quintet.

Garcia Barrios conducted Heitor Villa Lobos’ Sexteto en Forma de Choros, which, despite the title, was played by eight musicians. They gave the acerbic, neoclassical opus a well-disciplined reading, and oboist Glouzman contributed an admirable number of splashy, virtuoso riffs.

However, Manuel Ponce’s traditional “Estrellita,” arranged for violin, clarinet, saxophone, contrabass, xylophone and piano, seemed lax and perfunctory. Two chestnuts, Massenet’s cloying Meditation from “Thais” and Kreisler’s familiar waltz, sounded under-rehearsed and wan. A trio of Scott Joplin rags led by Garcia Barrios closed the concert on a lively note. Heard in the July Tijuana concert, they appear to be the group’s most upbeat calling card. Whether these straightforward ditties actually need a leader is questionable. It appeared that the seven performers could ramble through them in their sleep without missing a beat.