Young Chamber Players Excel in Two Adventurous Programs

As a cap to the roving International Laureates Music Festival, the I Palpiti Chamber Orchestra checked in at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre over the weekend for two outdoor concerts. The festival provides polish for talented young musicians from around the world. On Friday and Sunday, the chamber orchestra proved its mettle under variable al fresco conditions, yet the most notable feature of the appearances was the free-thinking programming.

Conductor Eduard Schmieder chose out-of-the-way yet attractive, audience-friendly pieces from four centuries, sometimes in defiantly inauthentic arrangements. Alas, amplification problems Friday night played havoc with the strings, but things sounded far better balanced and more alive Sunday morning. Friday’s program led off with the miraculously cogent String Symphony No. 10 by the 14-year-old Mendelssohn, and ended with Beethoven’s String Quartet Opus 95 as blown up for string orchestra by none other than Gustav Mahler. Mahler’s arrangement is more of a stunt than an enhancement--the exposed passages for solo violins are notoriously difficult to hold together--and I Palpiti handled it with more raw, youthful urgency than finesse.

In between the two lay Shostakovich’s romping Piano Concerto No. 1, in which Ukrainian-born pianist Valentina Lisitsa displayed a crystalline technique, stretching tempos to the breaking point in the Lento but also daring to play the final jazzy cadenza in a bawdy stride fashion--as Shostakovich himself played it. Omar Butler handled the solo trumpet part with sass.

I Palpiti’s Sunday performances were in general more cohesive and more freely expressive, beginning with Benjamin Britten’s warmly voiced arrangement of Purcell’s Chacony in G minor. After a chilly opening, Aulis Sallinen’s “The Nocturnal Dances of Don Juanquixote” rambled delightfully through raggy rhythms, tangos and false endings, provoking a jaunty response from solo cellist Adolfo Gutierrez Arenas.

Lisitsa returned to supply a featherweight touch to Joaquin Turina’s schmaltzy “Rapsodia Sinfonica,” and violinist Pavel Sporcl cut quite a charismatic profile with his bright-red sweatband and molten, concentrated rendition of an uncredited, lusciously anachronistic string arrangement of Tartini’s “Devil’s Trill” Sonata. Best known for his score for “The Godfather,” Nino Rota’s “Concerto per Archi” is a viable, attractive, neo-classical-tinged concert piece, and Schmieder gave it a fleet-paced workout.