MUSIC REVIEW : Sparse Gathering Treated to an Often-Wondrous Camerata Performance

Before the Mozart Camerata’s concert Saturday night, the group’s president, Ralph Smith Jr., asked audience members to tell their friends about future concerts, reflecting an obvious need to sell more tickets: The house at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church was barely two-thirds full. But the music-making often was wondrous.

The best was the most demanding--Mozart’s early F major Divertimento K.138, which opened the program, and music director Ami Porat’s arrangement of the “Adagio cantabile” movement from Tchaikovsky’s “Souvenir de Florence,” which opened the second half.

With these works, the 24 strings overcame indifferent intonation and an imprecise ensemble to produce surges of sound and passion, colored by a imaginative wealth of inner detail, that made the church’s aggressive acoustics ring with a real sense of the individual characteristics that lay behind each piece’s gorgeous facade.

The Mozart, perhaps because of its simple technical requirements, benefited most from Porat’s richly flavored, strongly personalized interpretations. Although the music’s graceful ebb and flow occasionally was disturbed by an overly enthusiastic bass pizzicato or Maestro Porat’s flamboyant podium presence, the Camerata’s ability to layer nuances of phrasing and dynamics within the context of Porat’s compelling dramatic arguments allowed the music to speak clearly and from the heart.

The Tchaikovsky faltered in the difficult middle sections, but Porat’s sense of theater, buoyed by strong playing by concertmaster Clayton Haslop, principal cellist Vage Ayrikyan and principal violist Simon Oswell, soon had the music swelling and sighing to an impressive conclusion.

Unfortunately, the Camerata’s technical shortcomings prevented it from infusing the modest virtues of Puccini’s delicate “Crisantemi” with the necessary swirls of pastel color, while a moderately interesting quartet by Donizetti, again in arrangement by Porat, lacked the operatic zing it needed to capture and hold interest.

The concert ended with a performance of Mozart’s “Eine kleine Nachtmusik” that tried dutifully but without real success to make that overly played chestnut more than a pleasant, late-night buzz in the ears.