Mozart Remembered in Animated, Involved Concert

Perhaps flu season had hit potential concert-goers hard or maybe holiday festivities had tuckered everyone out. Whatever the reason, the Mozart Camerata played to a hall only one-third full Saturday night at Irvine Barclay Theatre.

Those who did turn out were treated to animated and involving performances of three works by Mozart and a concerto by Felice de Giardini.

Chief among these was the “Prague” Symphony, K. 504. Written in 1786 for the city that adored Mozart when Vienna had proved less receptive, the work requires virtuosic ensemble and quicksilver characterization. Under the leadership of music director Ami Porat, it received a multifaceted dramatic reading, enlivened by clean, energetic playing.

Also on a program celebrating Mozart’s Jan. 27 birthday anniversary was a peppy romp through his Overture to “Il Re Pastore”--after which the audience failed to applaud until Porat finally motioned for the orchestra to bow--and the Rondo from his Serenade No. 7, K. 250, the “Haffner.”

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Concertmaster Mischa Lefkowitz took the solo for the rondo and for Giardini’s Violin Concerto in A, which immediately followed. Lefkowitz, orchestra members and Porat engaged in some discussion before finally settling on the order printed in the program, but, in retrospect, the reverse might have been the more successful. Giardini--who, incidentally, had written an opera on “Il Re Pastore” 10 years before Mozart’s work was written--left us a pleasant showcase for the instrument on which he had been a touring artist. It offers graceful insight into the melodic, Italian style of the period but lacks the timeless sense of greatness that glimmers even through Mozart’s most modest entertainments.

Lefkowitz made an attractive enough case for the concerto, except for an unimaginative reading of the adagio and a studied approach to rambling cadenzas by Ettore Bonelli. But his crisp technique served Heifetz’s arrangement of Mozart’s rondo, where Lefkowitz’s playing could be given smart support by his comrades through the original orchestra accompaniment.

As an encore, Porat led the string sections in his touching, romantic arrangement of the Air from J.S. Bach’s Suite No. 2, BWV 1067.