Munich Orchestra Gives Its All

The Munich Chamber Orchestra seemed to have everything going for a successful tour stop--an engaging, unhackneyed program, immaculately prepared, and an attractive soloist. Everything, that is, except an audience. Sunday evening a band of intent listeners filled Carpenter Performing Arts Center in Long Beach to about quarter capacity for the visitors, who were making their second local appearance in as many seasons.

Undeterred by all the empty seats, the Munich Chamber Orchestra gave of its estimable best. This was a string ensemble of an appealing, middle-weight sound, not the ultimate in pure tonal beauty, perhaps, but deployed with impressive unanimity of phrasing across a wide range of dynamics, color and articulation.

Working from memory, conductor and music director Christoph Poppen led vivid accounts of Dvorak’s Serenade in E, Opus 22, and Bartok’s Divertimento, based on an aggressively kinetic sense of rhythm. This was pirouette-on-a-dime music-making, rich in assured nuance but firmly motivated toward larger ends.

Soprano Juliane Banse, Poppen’s wife, proved a vocal actress of rare expressivity and charisma in Britten’s “Les Illuminations.” Alert to all the insinuations of this most sensual of song cycles, she produced shimmering, languid lines and sardonic narrative with equal ease. Poppen and his orchestra provided fully engaged, interactive accompaniment in a performance that would be a knockout on disc.

Schubert’s “Salve Regina,” radiantly sung and sweetly played, completed the printed schedule. A fluidly sweeping, sentimentally uninhibited waltz from Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings was the encore.