Beethoven Program Fails to Do Justice to Array of Works

Drawing from the overly familiar to the rarely heard, the Pacific Virtuosi celebrated Beethoven’s 230th birthday four months early in a four-part program Sunday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

Series artistic director Leonid Levitsky opened the program with the popular “Moonlight” Sonata. He and Boris Andrianov teamed up for the lesser-known Seven Variations for Piano and Cello (based on “Bei Mannern, welche Liebe fuhlen” from Mozart’s “Die Zauberflote”) and also for the far more substantial Cello Sonata in A, Opus 69.

To close the concert, Michel Zukovsky joined the two for The Trio for Clarinet, Cello and Piano in B-flat, Opus 11.

Levitsky’s “Moonlight” shed no new light on the piece and seemed uncharacteristically rough and routine. Unlike the typical excursion into dreamy textures, the first movement here seemed built on contrast between muscular propulsion and a turning inward.

Levitsky enjoyed the playful suspensions in the second movement and launched into the finale with aggressive drive, conceptually closing the circle with the muscularity he had expressed in the first movement.

The Seven Variations on Mozart’s “Zauberflote” duet is a slight, but still ingenious work. It shows Beethoven’s ease in extrapolating new musical ideas from a single source, but even better, approximating the meditative still-point that Mozart managed to sound sometimes in the slow movements of his piano concertos. (As ill luck would have it, of course, it was during this work that someone’s cell phone rang twice.)

The meatiest piece of the program was the A-major Cello Sonata, which Andrianov initiated as if from a brooding, haunted presence. But something about the performance seemed unfinished.

The work remained a broad canvas upon which the episodes didn’t organically relate. Apart from the haunting opening measures and their recurrences, the only other magical moments came in the hushed, lulling rhythmic duet in the scherzo and the brief Adagio cantabile.

The Opus 11 Trio makes no pretensions about being a profound work, but it does have a songful Adagio which brought out Andrianov’s sensitive lyricism. Zukovsky’s playing was tender, and the collaborations throughout were supportive and substantial.

The three musicians repeated the Adagio as their single encore.