St. John Siblings Perform Violin in Harmony With Technical Flair

A strong Canadian connection took hold onstage at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza on Saturday. There, Hamilton, Ontario-based maestro Boris Brott led an appropriately compact edition of his fine New West Symphony, and the Ontario-born-and-bred siblings Lara and Scott St. John appeared as soloists, individually and in tandem, showing their subtle and impressive wares. If geocentric thinking has any merit, Ontario had a cultural field day.

The subtitle for the program was “Virtuosi,” but said virtuosity came in various shades and densities. Both 20-something violinists, precocious and generally lauded, brought a silken tone and carefully measured bravura to Beethoven’s Romances for Violin and Orchestra, Opus 40 and Opus 50. These lovely, untroubled works are all about unhurried grace and easy dialogue with the orchestra, demanding emotional aplomb as much as dexterity on demand, which they got.

Higher heat, albeit through a Baroque filter, emerged in Bach’s Double Concerto in D minor, in which the guests joined the stage and engaged in what could be viewed as sibling conversation, minus the rivalry.

The St. Johns rarely perform together and have pursued separate career paths--Lara, for one, released a moving recording of solo Bach music two years ago. Here, on Bach turf, they created an impression of harmonious accord and seamless technical flair, from the energetic outer movements to the largo. Virtuosity, again, was less of the flashy, romantic variety, but a matter of feeling and controlled facility.

Brott showed off the orchestra’s considered musicality in pieces framing the violin: Stravinsky’s Danses Concertantes, a delicious mid-century work of hopeful neoclassical spirits and tart dissonances, and Mozart’s “Jupiter” symphony, similarly propped up on gentility and passion. The orchestra offered persuasive readings of these historically disparate, but somehow kindred, works.

Under Brott’s no-nonsense guidance, the New West Symphony has become, in its short four-year life, an impressive contender in the orchestral West. The most disturbing aspect of the concert, happy to report, was offstage: a few occasions of the dreaded, continuity-busting applause between movements. Is this a price paid for cultivating new audiences, unaccustomed to protocol, to classical concerts?