Philharmonic Player Places Her Stamp on Chamber Concert

Releasing the livelier players from an orchestra is like freeing mastermind criminals from prison. They will immediately form their own chamber music ensembles and celebrate their liberty by choosing their own music, playing it their way, and freely reveling in the limelight if they feel like it.

Michele Zukovsky was just such an escaped musician Monday night, when the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s principal clarinetist got her way for the first half of the orchestra’s Chamber Music Society program at the Gindi Auditorium of the University of Judaism. Zukovsky champions the music of Bohuslav Martinu, the prolific 20th century Czech composer. Last year she made a winning recording of Martinu wind music with the Bohemian Ensemble of Los Angeles, namely a gang of Philharmonic members on the lam.

Some of that gang was on stage Monday for two brief pieces, the Serenade No. 3 and “Les Rondes.” Both are from the early ‘30s, written in Paris, where the composer had immigrated before heading to the United States in 1940. Zukovsky’s is a worthy cause. These are works punch-drunk with the heady Parisian atmosphere of the time. Martinu wrote effortlessly and probably too much, but these miniatures drip with color and quick wit. Perky as Stravinsky but taking sudden lyrical turns, such as a lilting piano phrase here and there in “Les Rondes” so catchy and sweet that one hardly believes one’s ears.

Both were premieres--the Serenade was new to the U.S.; “Les Rondes,” a West Coast first--and both were given polished and engaged performances by Philharmonic wind and strings players that would be hard to better. The pianist in “Les Rondes” was Gloria Cheng-Cochran, still in the glow of her glittery playing last week as the Philharmonic’s soloist in Messiaen.

In between those pieces, Zukovsky, setting rows of score pages on a couple of music stands, quipped to the audience that is was time for something entirely different, Elliott Carter’s tiny clarinet solo, “Gra,” written five years ago for the Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski’s 80th birthday but played as part the Philharmonic celebration of Carter’s 90th, which was Friday.

It was not so different as all that, and clever programming. Carter was an impressionable young composer himself in Paris in the early ‘30s, and although he quickly threw off Stravinskyan neoclassicism for a style more irregular and tangled, he never lost the flexibility he learned there. “Gra” means “game” in Polish, and the score is a tumbling but also touching acrobatic act for solo clarinet that, just like Martinu, can turn astonishingly angelic for an instant. A dazzling exercise for the mind, it was also, in Zukovsky’s agile performance, great, cavorting entertainment.

Keeping to the mainly Czech theme of the evening, the big work, splendidly played, was Dvorak’s Piano Quintet in A, with guest pianist Armen Guzelimian. The Philharmonic players celebrated their independence. First violinist Bing Wang ignited sparks of electricity; cellist Daniel Rothmuller produced the opposite, grandly rhapsodic phrases; the inner voices, violinist Michell Newman and violist Ralph Fielding, shot through the texture with nervous strength.

Guzelimian, a Los Angeles pianist best known as a sympathetic accompanist of singers, was the glue. Understated but superbly detailed and magisterially musical, he didn’t try to stand out quite as much as some pianists like to in this robust score, but he is a chamber music master who contributes just the kind of support that makes everyone sound better. His is the discipline and authority that makes freedom possible and responsible, that makes the best chamber music serve as a grand model for society.