Chamber Orchestra Offers Mozart Serenade

The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra Winds offered a rare glimpse Monday night, at the Ford Amphitheatre, of a Mozartean gem, the Serenade No. 10, K. 370a, the so-called “Gran Partita” for 12 wind instruments and double bass.

Most likely written as background music for an outdoor gathering, as was the custom with wind serenades, the “Gran Partita” contains music of the highest level of invention, as if Mozart were just seeing what he could do with an inconsequential genre.

The unusual instrumental contingent, which includes two basset horns, alto members of the clarinet family, seems to have fired his imagination, and he explores the unique sound possibilities relentlessly.

Seven movements and 45 minutes in length, the serenade is filled with various trios, quartets and sextets of often delicious sonority that Mozart contrasts to the massed sound of the ensemble, a chocolatey, airy organ-like timbre underpinned by the pillowy thump of the double bass.

The piece sounds like Mozart in a candy store, so much fun does he have. At one point, he brings together a quartet of clarinets and basset horns murmuring softly below a solo, like liquid gold. At another, he sets up a kind of slow-motion beguine accompaniment in the lower instruments, out of which floats a single high oboe note.

Unfortunately, the rest of the concert wasn’t as good. The LACO Winds played suites from “The Barber of Seville” and “The Marriage of Figaro” interspersed with rhymed, Ogden Nash-style narration by Alan Chapman, read by him and Karen Benjamin. It was all pleasant (to a point) and witty (to a point), but the arrangements did no justice to the originals.

Nor were they played with much sparkle. The serenade fared much better, the performance was tighter and vital, but it would have benefited from the presence of a conductor. Too bad Jeffrey Kahane, who begins his tenure next week as LACO’s conductor, couldn’t have shown up Sunday and made the acquaintance of his wind players in this miraculous piece.