Subtleties Nearly Lost Amid Chamber Celebration

Beginning its fourth decade, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra opened its 31st season with a gala event Saturday night in Royce Hall at UCLA. It was a happy occasion, with showy orchestral performances under the enthusiastic leadership of Jeffrey Kahane--starting his third year as leader of the ensemble--and with players and most of the audience dressed to the teeth to welcome the new season.

Energetic and firmly in control, Kahane displayed his orchestra handsomely at both ends of the program, beginning with a loud and boisterous run-through of Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony and concluding with an impressive, full-out, none-too-subtle reading of Beethoven’s Eighth.

Both showed the players in good form and high spirits, yet too often their brilliance turned to raucousness. Of course these works represent bright musical adventures, but they also contain their share of gentleness and lyricism, qualities Kahane & Co. did not address.

It has been noted that the new Royce Hall is not acoustically warm, that it does not impart a sheen to orchestral playing. True enough, but the room’s acoustical properties can be utilized to flatter the sounds of a symphonic ensemble, if conductor and players will make the effort and adjust their resources.

The one place where this actually happened Saturday was in the serious, melancholy and touching “Elegy” by LACO composer-in-residence Kenneth Frazelle. This 10-minute work, written in memory of the late American singer Jan DeGaetani, creates a neo-Bartokian aural picture of grief and loss. Kahane and his musicians gave it a splendid and haunting reading.

The versatile, gifted American baritone Jubilant Sykes dominated the midportion of this program, first with arias from Bach’s “St. Matthew” Passion and Mozart’s “Magic Flute” and “Nozze di Figaro,” then in excerpts from Copland’s “Old American Songs” and in a gussied-up arrangement of the spiritual “City Called Heaven.”

Sykes’ mellow and virtually edgeless baritone may not possess the most idiomatic resonance for the opera stage, but his authority cannot be questioned. His Bach and Mozart can become almost croony, yet he savors words and engages his listeners with the sincerity of his delivery.

*

He displayed practiced showmanship in the three Copland songs, then, with the aid of a microphone, showed the power of authoritative spiritual singing. His encore, a shamelessly commercialized arrangement of “Were You There?,” brought some members of the audience to their feet.

Throughout, and with only occasional swamping of the soloist, Kahane and the orchestra proved stylish and fully participating collaborators. One had nearly forgotten, for instance, how well the L.A. Chamber Orchestra plays Bach; here was a happy reminder.