L.A. Chamber Soloists Shine in Spotlight

There is not a dud program on the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s season anywhere, although the ambitious effort heard Friday at Royce Hall really amounted to two concerts in one. The tie that loosely bound was the featured solo instrumentation: piano and violin, well matched and thrillingly played by music director Jeffrey Kahane and concertmaster Margaret Batjer.

The first half presented tradition-busting works by Silvestre Revueltas and Lou Harrison, employing small solo subsets of the talent-filled orchestra. Kahane provided clear, well-motivated contexts for his capable groups, dominated in Revueltas’ spiky “Ocho por Radio” and “Homenaje a Federico Garcia Lorca” by the brilliant trumpet of David Washburn and, in the latter, the astonishingly flamboyant and facile tuba of Douglas Tornquist.

The emotional contrast could not have been sharper with the amiable, softly nuanced world of Harrison’s Suite for Violin, Piano and Small Orchestra. First among an ensemble of equals, Batjer floated smoothly in the lyrical Elegy and Chorale, and Kahane brought out the jazzy twists of the gamelan-inspired movements.

The second half turned to traditional works. Haydn’s “Miracle” Symphony, No. 96, is a defining wonder of classical ideals, here immaculately turned out in a joyously fleet, limber reading.

The young Mendelssohn’s technical understanding of those classical tenets may not have been fully formed in his D-minor Concerto for Violin, Piano and Strings, with its sudden shifts from pseudo-Baroque seriousness into over-the-top virtuoso froth. But it can be great fun until wearied by repetition, and Kahane and Batjer gave it as inexhaustibly dazzling and ebullient a chance as it may ever have.