Batjer, Kahane Boldly Take On ‘Kreutzer’

A fascination with whole-genre cycles has long been a facet of the cult of Beetho-ven. The big cycles offer a sense of challenge and summation, in music that came from a period of change much like our own. Locally, we have heard all nine symphonies in one week last season, and Mari Kodama is surveying the 32 piano sonatas over three seasons.

Somewhere in between these extremes lies the more modest and manageable cycle of 10 violin sonatas, covered in three concerts this month by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s concertmaster Margaret Batjer and pianist Jeffrey Kahane, the orchestra’s music director. The first installment Thursday evening at Zipper Hall matched the sunniest, most innocent sonatas of Opus 12 with the turbulent, complex “Kreutzer,” Opus 47.

The bold and brilliant way Batjer and Kahane rode the “Kreutzer” furies was prefigured last week by their similar work in Mendelssohn’s juvenile concerto for violin and piano. But Mendelssohn gave them no opportunities for interactive reflection and development such as abound in Beethoven’s central variations.

Kahane personalized each one with probity, wit and feeling, playing with a supple sense of line and a sense of weight as a palpable element of color and articulation. Batjer floated in and out of his expressive streams with an eloquent elegance of her own, more suave than bouncy in the second variation, for example.

Theirs was not an immaculate performance, with split keys or an attack more scratch than crunch occasionally. But it was a lively, embracing performance, thoroughly integrated and also utterly uninhibited.

In comparison, the Opus 12 sonatas, Nos. 1 and 3 in D and E-flat, seemed merely pretty. Much of the difference is in the composer’s development--the increase in invention and dimension from Opus 12 to Opus 47 is greater than that from the First Symphony to the “Eroica.” But something more organic and warmly inhabited than the pert, amiable gloss applied here is still possible.