MUSIC AND DANCE REVIEWS : Jaime Laredo and Friends at Philharmonic

It seemed like a gathering of friends, at Jaime Laredo’s second week visit to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which began Thursday night in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Laredo, a successful violinist-violist who over the decades has added to his musical expertise an admirable competency in conducting chamber orchestras, invited his student from the Curtis Institute, Californian Leila Josefowicz, to share soloist duties with her teacher. Emerging from the reduced Philharmonic--some three dozen players onstage--were more soloists: flutists Anne Diener Giles and Roland Moritz and trumpeter Thomas Stevens.

The pleasing, if often thick-textured, performances accomplished by these 40 players, spread out on the Pavilion’s broad forestage, addressed familiar works by Bach (the Fourth “Brandenburg” and Double Violin Concertos), Mozart (Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola, K. 364) and Haydn (the Trumpet Concerto).

Perhaps it wasn’t important that Laredo gave us no new insights or revelations in these well-worn pieces; he led amiable, forward-thrusting readings. For the most part, however, one missed the kind of transparency and buoyancy two generations of specialists have led us to expect in this repertory.

Josefowicz, 17, a product of the Colburn School of Performing Arts in Los Angeles (she studied there, 1986-91), sailed handsomely and effortlessly through her second-fiddle duties, though, in the Sinfonia Concertante, the buttery sound of Laredo’s viola rather stole the show. The two violinists meshed beautifully in the double concerto.

Giles and Moritz also balanced neatly with violinist Laredo in the G-major “Brandenburg,” beginning this evening on a joyous note. In the Haydn Concerto, the stylish pleasures of hearing trumpeter Stevens in a solo spot proved aurally profitable--again.

* Los Angeles Philharmonic, Jaime Laredo, conductor, repeats this Bach/Mozart/Haydn program tonight at 8 and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. , in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., (213) 850-2000. Tickets $6-$50.