Cool Polish Marks Camerata Pacifica Concert

Professional competency is sometimes enough in the performance of symphonic music and even opera. It is never so in chamber music, where personal warmth and communicative interplay are necessary ingredients.

In much of the Camerata Pacifica’s program, Sunday in the Forum Theatre of the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza, the necessities failed to materialize. When they did, they proved the rule.

The Camerata, a flexibly sized chamber ensemble that presents a broad palette of music in the city of Santa Barbara and Ventura County, enlisted four of its members on this occasion, in music by Ravel, Martinu, William Bolcom and Brahms.

Violinist Roger Wilkie and pianist Joanne Pearce Martin provided a technically proficient but under-characterized reading of Ravel’s Violin Sonata. The second movement, “Blues,” lacked its snazzy curves, the finale its danger. The same duo offered a genial account of Bolcom’s brief “Graceful Ghost,” a nostalgic, medium-paced ragtime.

In Brahms’ Sonata, Opus 120, No. 1, violist Donald McInnes sought intimate expressive details and took hairpin turns, while Martin went her own route, ample and bold and sometimes overpowering her partner.

Only in Martinu’s breezy and bounding 1945 Flute Sonata did the musicians, Adrian Spence and Martin, really gel. The rhythms popped, the phrases tumbled and bumped kinetically. Spence and Martin seemed like two kids in a field, playing tag, mimicking each other and sharing discoveries.