MUSIC : Brown Inspires LACO Vivaldi

There are very few musicians who in performance can get across their sheer love of music as strongly as does Iona Brown. Locally, one probably has to hark back to Carlo Maria Giulini to think of another.

The remarkable thing about Brown is that, as with Giulini, her love is contagious. The best part of her concert Friday night with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra came when the ensemble caught her spirit, becoming, in effect, a whole orchestra of Browns.

In this Vivaldi program at Royce Hall that best part came with Brown fully in charge, standing in front of the orchestra as soloist, conductor, muse and instigator in the violin concertos that make up the “Four Seasons.”

This was no pleasant walk-through of the familiar score, but a hugely expressive tour de force. The work became a tone poem of intense and lyrical feelings, though never Romanticized in either Brown’s sweet but pointed solo flights or in the orchestra’s aggressive yet always buoyant allegros. One might hear more immaculate performances (perhaps), but none more daring or fully engaged.

The first half, with Brown seated in the first-violin spot and LACO members as soloists, seemed fairly innocuous by comparison. Richard Todd and Steven Becknell vaulted merrily through the Concerto for Two Horns, P. 321. Susan Greenberg’s playing of the Concerto, P. 79, though solid and mechanically impressive, was hampered by the fact that the work is better suited to the more resonant and softer-hued 18th-Century recorder than to the steely modern piccolo. Only flutist David Shostac approached the heights of Brown’s performances, in a vivaciously inflected and songful reading of the Concerto P. 155, “Il Cardellino.”