Music Reviews : Smaller Orchestra but Not Diminished Returns

These are not happy times for the Orange County Chamber Orchestra. In fact, there is no Orange County Chamber Orchestra, per se , at least not for its last two scheduled 1994-95 concerts.

Scrambling again on Sunday afternoon at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, music director Diana Halprin had to offer chamber music--five players only--in place of a larger ensemble because of “the crisis in our orchestra,” as she put it in a letter distributed at the event. The crisis consists of a “critical financial shortfall.”

Halprin’s reaction to the shortfall is interesting. Partly in response to patron requests, she decided to talk about the music at hand, in the apparent belief that if you explain it, they will come. Her earnest, meandering, concert-time demonstration / lecture lasted 48 minutes.

The program itself was no hit parade. Again, Halprin’s apparent faith in the power of music led her to choose (logically) some of the most powerful music: Schubert’s monumental String Quintet in C, D. 956, preceded by his brief “Quartettsatz,” D. 703. Not exactly the kind of agenda designed to jam the turnstiles.

Nevertheless, the smallish audience listened attentively to both Halprin’s lengthy lecture and to the hourlong Quintet. Though the lecture was hardly a tautly focused affair, Halprin did manage to explain some of the nuts and bolts of music, scoring big, for instance, in demonstrating the difference between Rossini’s idea of an accompaniment and Schubert’s.

The performance of the Quintet enlisted violinists Halprin and Joseph Goodman, violist Lynn Lusher and cellists Maurice Grants and Erika Duke and proved better than passable. Generally well-tuned and fluidly, attentively played, this was a solid reading that uncovered many of the Schubertian beauties therein. The “Quartettsatz,” minus Duke, sounded less convincing, more thrown together, but certainly professional.

A critic’s two-cents’ worth: Under its previous music director, Micah Levy, O.C. Chamber Orchestra concerts were never particularly straightforward. Now, Halprin believes even more unusual measures are called for. So why not try the basics? Overture, concerto, symphony. Less talk, more music. Crawling before walking.