MUSIC REVIEW : Porat and Mozart Camerata Close Season on High Note

Music director Ami Porat conducted the Mozart Camerata in a polished and provocative season-ending program Saturday night. The ensemble featured Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto as its centerpiece, but oddly, the orchestra, not the pianist, emerged heroic at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church.

Daniel Pollack had originally been scheduled to play the concerto. Instead, Robert Thies, a recent USC graduate who has studied with Pollack, replaced the more experienced artist. Thies brought impressive solidity and clarity to the task, but little excitement or depth, and only a limited pianistic palette.

His accompanists, on the other hand, offered a passionate account of their roles, faltering only in occasional, exposed, weak violin passages during the first movement.

Overall, however, Porat commanded pointed precision and led his band through deft shifts of color and mood. First-chair woodwind players--flutist Patty Cloud, oboist Leanne Becknell, clarinetist Caroline Tobin and bassoonist Norbert Nielubowsky--approached their solos with particular warmth and sensitivity.

Haydn’s Symphony No. 99, in E-flat, gave the wind players still more time to revel in the limelight. During the Adagio, Cloud, Becknell and Nielubowsky formed an especially attentive, absorbing trio, over the strings’ tenuous, transparent lyricism.

Although there were fleeting instances of imperfect intonation and imprecise entrances, technical quality remained generally reliable and did not impede a pervasive sense of compelling energy and crispness. Porat emphasized contrast, exhorting his musicians to frame a dramatic climax for the Adagio and aristocratic pomp in the Minuet with light, clear outer movements, sprinkled with amiable humor.

A reading of the Overture to Mozart’s “La Clemenza di Tito” began the evening with infectious vitality and prescient control over dynamics and dramatic content.