MUSIC REVIEW : An Uneven Chamber Concert

Keeping your fingers crossed probably isn’t such a bad idea when attending a concert of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Chamber Music Society. One never knows quite what to expect. Like supermarket tomatoes, the ad-hoc ensembles can range from good-for-nothing to great.

Monday night that inconsistency was clearly exhibited, piece by piece. Fortunately, the Society’s concert in the University Synagogue in Brentwood (substituting for a quake-damaged Gindi Auditorium), featuring music of Janacek, Mozart and Schumann, went on an upward curve.

That left the listener contemplating the wonders of Schumann’s Piano Quintet, Opus 44, given a vigorous and knowing performance by guest pianist Peter Frankl and a crack string quartet of Philharmonic players: Mark Baranov and Suli Xue, violins, John Hayhurst, viola, and Barry Gold, cello.

The excellence of this reading ran from the players’ minute involvement in dynamics, instrumental balance and moment-to-moment expression to a clear view of the grand plan. Tempos, perfectly gauged, settled into poised grooves. Frankl, who has recorded this work, seemed to energize his chamber partners and vice versa, with predictably engrossing results.

The same could not be said for the account of Mozart’s Quintet for Piano and Winds, K. 452, where the musicians sounded as if they were on different plains, pianist Frankl all spirited inflection and intelligent nuance, the Philharmonic winds, apparently oblivious to his urgings, clocking in with a sort of generic lyricism and full tone. The thing, though solid, fairly plodded.

Which one would have gladly settled for in Janacek’s folksy Suite for Strings (his earliest surviving work), which opened the program in a strikingly disheveled run-through. Someone should have stepped in and stopped the struggle.