Music Reviews : LACO Season Finale Displays Energy and Identity Crisis

For its final program of a financially troubled season, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra seemed, quixotically, intent on showing how expensive it could be.

Its program on Thursday at Ambassador Auditorium consisted of familiar works, guided by the propulsive yet sensitively shaping baton of Christof Perick and played by as many as 50 super-skilled musicians.

Big music--two Rossini overtures, those to “La scala di seta” and “Semiramide”--surrounded Mozart’s fragile Concerto for Flute and Harp and Schubert’s big, “Unfinished” Symphony.

Every measure of this crowd-pleasing agenda was marked by energy and cohesiveness, with the ensemble’s celebrated wind principals--clarinetist Gary Gray, oboist Allan Vogel and flutist David Shostac, the latter joined by harpist JoAnn Turovsky in the Mozart concerto--delivering with optimum aplomb.

The “Unfinished” was lithe and lean, but hardly severe, its songs sung with natural grace and without dubious late-Romantic expressive enhancements.

These lofty accomplishments, however, also served to focus on the orchestra’s identity crisis.

LACO’s founding aim was to present relatively intimate repertory, chiefly from the 18th and 20th centuries, otherwise unavailable locally on a high professional level. Since then, LACO has increasingly encroached on “symphony orchestra” material, the fact that it may not have been intended for Philharmonic-sized forces notwithstanding.

Thursday’s concert was grand and even subtle fun, with degrees of dynamic shading--and volume--that 20-some musicians could not have accomplished. But then the dozens of middle-period Haydn symphonies and neo-classical Stravinsky we rarely hear require something quite different.

Small-ensemble Haydn costs much less to produce. But it’s unlikely to elicit the high-volume audience delight of a walloping Rossini crescendo and climax. A choice must be made.