Brown Returns to Chamber Orchestra

After more than a year’s absence and with a new title of principal conductor, Iona Brown returned to lead the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra Friday night, exchanging pleasantries with musicians and audience alike in a Baroque program centered around the concerto grosso.

That certain tentative and cautious qualities snuck into parts of these performances--loose ends in ensemble, safe tempos and dynamics--cannot be denied, especially since Brown and these players have shown such symbiotic expressiveness in the past.

Mostly, though, this program of string music by Purcell, Handel, Vivaldi and Corelli glowed amiably in Brown’s taut style of Baroque performance, a kind of musical elocution. Under her guidance, the music sounds well because it is always projected and articulate, always addressed with purpose and sculpted with grace, never obscure, wan or meandering. If others have found greater extremes in some of these pieces, few are more consistent and eloquent, less self regarding, than Brown.

Purcell’s “Abdelazer” suite, which began the concert in Veterans Wadsworth Theater, sprung to life in all of its geniality, bounciness and tunefulness, no fuss. The motor rhythms and violinistic display of two Concerti for Four Violins by Vivaldi (Opus 3, Nos. 4 and 10) gleamed, with Brown and chamber members the firm-handed soloists.

Brown’s trusting, low-key approach to Handel’s Concerto Grosso, Opus 6, No. 7, revealed it as one of the composer’s duller works (the dimming Wadsworthian acoustic didn’t help), and she left some of the extravagances of Corelli’s Opus 6, No. 1 Concerto Grosso unplumbed. But Handel’s Opus 6, No. 9, filled with great bits borrowed from his own earlier pieces, proved always merry and bright, forthrightly, pithily delivered.