Kahane’s Finale Proves a Point

In the course of one season, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and music director Jeffrey Kahane have gone, if Friday’s finale concert at Veterans Wadsworth Theater is indication, from casual acquaintances to old friends. Their music making was not only abidingly congenial but vividly detailed.

The program was stimulating, showcasing two treasures on the local music scene--Donald Crockett’s music and Kahane’s Mozart--and flanking them with seldom played works by Mendelssohn and Schumann.

In his 1992 “Antiphonies,” Crockett, on faculty at USC, created music both highly sophisticated and immediately accessible. Couched in a language evocative of, though less acerbic than, late Stravinsky, the piece has a wonderful crystalline quality: Musical impulses remain clearly distinct and airy, even as they jostle simultaneously on the sound canvas. The orchestration is masterful. There’s a wonderful racing energy to “Antiphonies,” produced from ideas quickly tossed about (hence the title), and yet it doesn’t shy away from lyrical beauty. Even Crockett’s use of canon, an often austere device, elicits poetic effect--it’s as if sounds are dropped in pools of water and we hear the expanding rings.

With the Piano Concerto No. 15, Kahane, conducting from the keyboard, again demonstrated his supreme Mozartean skills. In playing of minute nuance and feathery finesse, Kahane still finds the essential vocal qualities of this music. You can hear a singer’s breath in the phrasing, the physical pull of intervals, the construction of (wordless) sentences.

Mendelssohn’s “Fair Melusine” Overture and Schumann’s Overture, Scherzo and Finale provided the perfect bookends, in readings of pointed vigor and threaded melody.