Fresh Program, Treatment From Munich Chamber Group

Christoph Poppen and his Munich Chamber Orchestra made a stop at El Camino College’s Marsee Auditorium on Saturday night, armed with a fresher, relatively less-exposed repertoire than what we often get from touring string orchestras these days.

Britten’s Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge set British music on its collective ear in 1937--and it still sounds miraculous today, an alternately witty and moody down-payment on the future of a 23-year-old genius. Poppen made it move swiftly and crisply with lean, thoroughly unsentimental textures, while the somewhat dry Marsee acoustics exposed some tattered edges in the 19-member orchestra’s playing in the Aria Italiana and Fugue.

Turning to an even younger genius, co-concertmaster Daniel Giglberger bypassed Mendelssohn’s ubiquitous E-minor Violin Concerto in favor of an earlier, pleasantly inventive, sometimes unpredictable D-minor concerto that the composer wrote when he was all of 13. Giglberger liberally applied singing legato phrasing throughout the first two movements, while making a handful of cuts in the solo part of the finale.

The rarest work on the program was the Symphony No. 4 by Karl Amadeus Hartmann, one of several turbulent, tonal string orchestra works that proliferated in Europe and America during and just after World War II. While Hartmann’s opus isn’t as consistently gripping as other string symphonies from that time--those of William Schuman and Arthur Honegger come to mind--it inspired the Munich strings’ best performance of the evening, with urgent playing allied with a tense, coherent grasp on the score’s argument.