L.A. Mozart Orchestra Ends Season on High, Joyous Note

The Los Angeles Mozart Orchestra and conductor Lucinda Carver ended what may have been their most ambitious and rewarding season to date Saturday with an utterly delectable performance of Beethoven’s Second Symphony.

Even the time-dishonored acoustics and visual drabness of the Wilshire-Ebell Theatre were unable to work their reverse magic on a reading of such pulsating energy, joyousness and even polish, the latter hardly a given among ensembles that meet only four or five times a year.

While every aspect of Carver’s Beethoven pleased, the orchestra shone with particular splendor in the slow movement, with the wind and string exchanges delivered with notable grace, warmth and rhythmic precision.

The evening’s Mozart offering, the Flute Concerto in G, with Paul Fried the mellifluous, stylish soloist, began with some scrappy violin execution, but by the time the composer had entered the region of the sublime, in the moonstruck Adagio, the orchestra was on its best behavior, responding to Carver’s gentle ministrations cohesively and with subtly modulated dynamics.

The program opened with “The New Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” by the orchestra’s composer in residence, Maria Newman. It’s an amiable, overlong program piece--with stylistic references to Kodaly, Ravel and Stravinsky--on a circus theme, better suited to a children’s dance concert than to present company.