L.A. Chamber Orchestra Offers ‘Les Illuminations’

It’s no news that the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, under conductor Iona Brown’s guidance, is an inspired, efficient machine. The ensemble is reliably sharp, ever capable of bringing clearheaded vision to the stalwart stuff of Mozart and Beethoven, as it did Friday night at the Veterans Wadsworth Theater.

But the freshest item on the agenda came between the repertory staples: Benjamin Britten’s “Les Illuminations,” a striking setting of Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry that plays as well today as when it was composed in 1939, during the British composer’s stint in America. Rimbaud’s poetry from this volume is essentially an ambivalent reflection--now admiring, now repulsed--on his encounter with urban life in the late 19th century.

What Britten brings to the conceptual table is both a sympathy with Rimbaud’s queasy observations and a polishing of its emotional contours. The piece wavers moodily between the dynamics of a solemn, world-weary requiem and a giddy, cheeky parade; its recurring motif of urban alienation and intellectual hubris is, “I alone have the key to this savage parade.”

What the musicians at Wadsworth brought to Britten’s opus was a glorious, mischievous gleam. Soprano Harolyn Blackwell sang the text with the proper degree of assurance, panache and, where warranted, acerbic lippiness--as with the mock-regal veneer of “Royaute.” Blackwell gave nobility and gutsiness to a piece relevant to ‘90s Angelenos, prone to civic love/loathing.

The orchestra showed its mettle on the less paradoxical turf of Mozart’s Symphony No. 25 in G Minor, relishing the bold, stampeding unisons. The concert’s second half belonged to Beethoven’s 7th Symphony, a joyous and sublime occasion in the right hands. And it was mostly that. With the fastidious treatment of Brown et al, exuberance spilled off the page and the stage here, almost to a fault.