Another Delightful Discovery From Russia

Music stories and surprises keep coming out of Russia. Wednesday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, the Chamber Orchestra Kremlin, founded in Moscow in 1991 by violinist-conductor Misha Rachlevsky, proved to be a crackerjack ensemble of 18 youthful string players.

They played music spanning nearly three centuries, from Haydn to Barber, in a concert co-sponsored by the Laguna Chamber Music Society and the Philharmonic Society, and played it all well, although with varied impact.

The orchestra fared better--sounding lighter and more stylish--in works written for a string ensemble (Haydn’s Concerto; Dvorak’s E-minor Serenade) than in transcriptions for one (Barber’s Adagio for Strings; Schoenberg’s “Verklarte Nacht”), where it sounded stodgy and ponderous.

Still, it’s a talented group, splendidly unified in ensemble. It could be a tad more free, however.

But to its credit, the orchestra had Russian cellist Nina Kotova as its soloist in a bright, vivid account of Haydn’s Concerto in C, H. VIIb:I.

A child prodigy who began winning international competitions by the age of 15, Kotova ran into bad luck when her father died under mysterious circumstances. Among her problems were a struggle to get a visa to study in the United States and little money, but in a movie-like twist, by 1993 she was beginning to make it big as a New York fashion model.

She returned to music in 1996, and she’s a talent to reckon with--poised, committed, graceful and spirited.

The group played two encores: Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” and a humorous series of variations on the “Happy Birthday” song, as it might have been arranged by several different Strausses, Wagner and a few other composers.