Reveling in Summer on a Light Note

In “La Revue de Cuisine,” Bohuslav Martinu’s bit of charming Parisian jazz-age fluff, Pot and Lid almost become unglued by their extramarital dalliances with the urbane Twirling Stick and the unscrupulous Dish Cloth.

In “Summer Music,” Samuel Barber’s burbling wind quintet from 1956, an unrepentantly nostalgic American romantic looks back to his happy childhood summers.

Likewise, in Ernst von Dohnanyi’s Serenade in C for string trio, a young composer at the beginning of the century tries to hang on to less complicated times as the Austro-Hungarian Empire crumbles all around him.

Such are the smiles of summer nights that members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic recalled Monday night in the final installment of this summer’s Chamber Music Under the Stars at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre.

Music is a suitable medium for exhibiting such innocence, and memories of our past often return unbidden through melodies we associate with those times. Still, the intentional summoning of innocence through performance is, in fact, a matter of experience. And while lighthearted chamber music may be a pleasure for hard-working orchestra musicians who must play little-rehearsed programs night after night at the Hollywood Bowl, the pieces are not easy, and the playing of them is, in the end, more hard work.

There were, consequently, more furrowed brows than warm smiles this pleasant summer night under a nearly full moon that, along with the lights, left only a visible star or two to play under. Perhaps what such a night really recalled for the musicians was the endless work of summer music camps.

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It did, however, seem appropriate that a number of the younger Philharmonic musicians hired over the past year or two were featured in “Summer Music.” And it may be equally appropriate that it received the most striking performance. With Catherine Ransom (the flutist who began with the Philharmonic in May), Marion Arthur Kuszyk (oboe), Michele Grego (bassoon) and Elizabeth Cook-Shen (horn), the future of the orchestra’s winds seems assured. But it took veteran virtuoso Lorin Levee (clarinet) to add the smiles here.

Little more than care was taken with the warm Dohnanyi Serenade, with the Martinu joke ballet and with his earlier, and unfortunately uninspired, neoclassical Quartet for clarinet, horn, cello and snare drum, which opened the program. Under summertime conditions, nothing more expansive than that should be expected. But in Martinu’s ballet, which includes both Charleston and tango music, and which featured mostly veteran players, the Philharmonic players did prove once more that they probably have the best innate sense of jazz style of any major classical orchestra musicians anywhere.