Orchestra Excels at the Offbeat

With a touch of enterprise, Jeffrey Kahane threw some offbeat Bartok and Kodaly at us Friday night at Royce Hall. And from just the examples of Bartok’s spiky, driving Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion and Kodaly’s bucolic, early chamber orchestra work “Summer Evening,” you would scarcely guess that the two composers came from the same country (Hungary), let alone that they were close colleagues.

Though the Bartok exists in an orchestral version and Kahane had the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra at his disposal, he chose the original sonata edition, manning the first piano himself, with Canadian virtuoso Jon Kimura Parker on second piano and Wade Culbreath and Thomas Raney on percussion. Alas, the first movement sounded tentative, lacking mystery and undercut by strange balances and a watery tone emerging from the lidless pianos. Yet, by the third movement, the foursome had tapped energetically into the music’s rollicking momentum.

Kodaly’s “Summer Evening” is one of those geographically disconnected pieces that make marvelous parlor games--the modal harmonies actually seem to anticipate England’s Vaughan Williams without the latter’s ominous depths. Kahane and the LACO gave it a lithe, mobile performance, laced with exuberance and passion.

Perhaps the unyieldingly gleaming tone of the Yamaha piano at hand accounted for the rather one-dimensional array of colors in Parker’s performance of the Schumann Piano Concerto--and reducing the orchestral part to chamber size lightened the texture without really clarifying it. However, Parker found a steady, calm, rhythmically swinging quality in the finale and rode it to the finish line, asking rhetorical questions and answering them thoughtfully.