L.A. Chamber Returns to Royce Hall

The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra did not easily reach its milestone 30th anniversary gala at Royce Hall, UCLA, on Saturday night. The orchestra, begun so promisingly by Neville Marriner, developed a strong national reputation through recordings in its years (1978-1986) with Gerard Schwarz, but then became more marginalized under subsequent music directors Iona Brown and Christof Perick.

Bad luck also befell the ensemble in the last few seasons. The 1992 riots terminated its downtown Japan America Theatre Series. The 1994 earthquake closed Royce Hall, and its Westside audiences had to suffer through four years in the institutional, sonically bleak Wadsworth Theater. It was evicted from its best venue when the acoustically inviting Ambassador Auditorium closed its doors three years ago (LACO has now relocated its Eastside series at the Alex Theatre). The orchestra was also beset by financial difficulties and what seemed a revolving door at the executive director’s office.

But LACO is a survivor and now, the orchestra assures us in the program book, things have been made right again. Saturday marked its return to Royce Hall and the start of the second season for music director Jeffrey Kahane, with a black-tie benefit.

Yet the evening had little about it musically that was gala. The soloists were Kahane, himself, who frequently likes to conduct from the keyboard, and a young American soprano, Maria Jette. The cautiously imaginative program was hardly extraordinary for the orchestra.

As an ensemble, LACO is still in the rebuilding phase, and Kahane has yet to give it a distinct image or return it to its earlier glory days. But he is a likable and energetic conductor and a vivid pianist; he may yet succeed. Thus far, though, I think we do best thinking of this orchestra a work in progress.

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The finest moments on this occasion came in the brightest and fastest music and in Kahane’s own playing. He opened the program cheerfully secure in Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro” Overture. The last movement of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, conducted from the keyboard, was a breathlessly dramatic dialogue between piano and the orchestra at its tidiest, overcoming a choppy start.

Kahane has mastered the juggling trick of making two arms do the job of four conducting from the keyboard, but in Mozart’s concert aria, “Ch’io mi sordi di te? . . . Non temer amato bene,” K. 505, which is for soprano, piano and orchestra, he needed a fifth, particularly given how literal a singer the score-bound Jette was. Poised but again score-bound for “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” Samuel Barber’s clever and sentimentally apt setting of a passage from James Agee’s “A Death in the Family,” Jette skimmed the music’s surface, not always certain of pitch. Kahane seemed to compensate here in the opposite emphatic direction, which the orchestra interpreted as loud and steely.

LACO will have to learn to adjust to Royce Hall’s acoustic, which is livelier than at Wadsworth or the Alex, but not warm. Alberto Ginastera’s “Variationes Concertantes,” which closed the program, offered key players solo opportunities, with uneven results. The nationalistic Argentine score from 1953 should be better known than it is, and the performance proved that well enough. But again, fast was best. Ginastera ends his variations with a frantic malambo, a jousting dance for gauchos, and LACO played it with a promising flair and brilliance.