MUSIC REVIEW : Solid Local Debut by KREMERata Group

Everything seemed right except the room. When Gidon Kremer’s touring quintet, KREMERata Musica, made its local debut Wednesday night, the players, the repertory and the easy rapport common to first-class chamber playing all seemed in perfect sync.

The five musicians, led by violinist Kremer, displayed virtuoso skills sublimated by extraordinary finesse. The program spotlighted famous composers of the 17th and 20th centuries in less than familiar works. The audience, not huge but more attentive and less cough-prone than most at the Celebrity Recital series, listened raptly. Almost all was well.

Except--the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion?

Our beloved-by-many opera house and home of the L.A. Philharmonic, host to visiting ballet companies and big-name, big-toned soloists, capacity 3,200? As that admirable impresario of Chamber Music in Historic Sites, MaryAnn Bonino, has been telling us for more than 15 years: Chamber music belongs in chambers.

Nevertheless, Kremer and his colleagues from the Lockenhaus Festival in Austria braved the size and space of the Pavilion and made some beautiful music.

Most beautiful was the acknowledged masterpiece on this five-part program, Mozart’s sublime Divertimento in E-flat, K. 563, played by Kremer, violist Veronika Hagen and cellist Clemens Hagen (sister and brother, and members of the Hagen Quartet). This kind of musically pointed, emotionally benign and technically splendid performance comes around very seldom--how lucky were those of us who heard this one.

The rest of the evening also hit a high of achievement and pleasure. At the beginning Mozart’s Quartet in D, K. 285 was played by flutist Irena Grafenauer, Kremer and the two Hagens as handsomely and pristinely as one might wish.

That was followed by an odd-duck Janacek work, the Sonata for violin and piano, in which Kremer was assisted by Vadim Sakharov, a hyperactive (flailing arms, big preparations) but small-toned pianist who nonetheless seemed to have no trouble with his complicated part.

The piece, which outquirks Charles Ives’ sonatas for the same combination, tries to make a virtue out of chaos and changeability, becoming the musical equivalent of being in a room with a crazy person. Kremer/Sakharov played it imperturbably.

The other two-person piece on this program was Messiaen’s virtuosic and gorgeous “Le merle noir” (The Blackbird), played with ease by Grafenauer and Sakharov.

The goose before intermission became Alfred Schnittke’s short but hostile Piano Quartet, in which the composer tried to recompose Mahler and ended up, after fascinating failures, quoting him verbatim. The seven-minute piece is ghostly but alienating, and proved the perfect bracer for the interval.

At the end, the two encores were tangos by Peter Kiesewetter and Astor Piazzolla.