MUSIC REVIEW : Celebration of the Czech Spirit

While “Il Trovatore” raged before the crowd in Segerstrom Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Sunday afternoon, a smaller group of concert-goers filed into adjacent Founders Hall to partake of more modest fare.

The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra Winds were offering a “celebration of the Czech spirit,” said bassoonist John Steinmetz, in the form of Classical and Romantic music for wind band by three native composers: Rudolf Novacek, Franz Krommer and Antonin Dvorak.

The event turned out to be memorable, lifted--after intermission--from the realm of light entertainment by a stellar reading of Dvorak’s Serenade in D minor.

Within the ensemble--the score calls for an unusual combination: pairs of oboes, clarinets and bassoons, contrabassoon, three horns, cello and string bass--the 12 players deftly juggled shifting moods. They lent brusque, pointed declamation to the initial march-like theme and the lively finale. They supported one another through sensitive balance and brought each other’s ideas to moving fruition, especially in the long cantilenas of the slow movement.

Brandishing an impeccable technical command, the musicians also gave life to a cornucopia of lush solos. Those by oboist Allan Vogel, in the opening Moderato quasi marcia, and by clarinetist Gary Bovyer, in the Andante con moto, sparkled with grace and warmth.

Selections on the first half of the program typified the good-natured unpretentiousness most associated with music for harmonien --the wind octet, here represented with slight variations, but normally consisting of paired oboes, clarinets, bassoons and horns--popular in Eastern Europe during the late 18th and the 19th centuries. Novacek’s unrecorded, though once popular, Sinfonietta sports unflagging, light-hearted charm, even during its static Andante.

The aria-like Andante cantabile of Krommer’s Partita in F, Opus 57, departs briefly from the category of well-constructed outdoor amusement. Moreover, the composition imparted ample opportunity to showcase the technical savvy of these instrumentalists--particularly in the rhythmically unison lines of the first movement, which flew by with admirable ease and precision.