Chamber Music Mixed Bill Strikes a Happy Balance

Ad hoc, mixed-bill chamber music programs are often less than the sum of their parts. The latest effort from the Los Angeles Philharmonic Chamber Music Society on Monday evening at the University of Judaism’s Gindi Auditorium struck a happy, cumulative balance, finding a sort of coherent motley.

Repertory staples framed the agenda. Violinists Guido Lamell and Akiko Tarumoto, violist Dale Hikawa and cellist Stephen Custer opened the proceedings with a big-boned reading of Schumann’s String Quartet in A, Opus 41, No. 3. It had focused passion, rich sound and expressive energy to spare.

At the close was Mozart’s G-minor Piano Quartet. It may have been a bit blunt in the Andante, but violinist Stacy Wetzel, violist Minor L. Wetzel, cellist David Garrett and pianist Junko Ueno Garrett drove the outer movements with sturdy, interactive flair.

Although a century ago he was best-known as a conductor and the composer of large-scale operas and oratorios, August Klughardt remains a musical presence almost solely thanks to his Opus 79 Wind Quintet. A cheerfully tuneful and staunchly reactionary relic from 1902, the last year of Klughardt’s life, it offers plentiful solo opportunities within an intense ensemble workout.

Flutist Catherine Ransom, oboist Marion Arthur Kuszyk, clarinetist Monica Kaenzig, bassoonist Michele Grego and horn player Elizabeth Cook-Shen had fleeting struggles with intonation, but also delivered lyric grace and sprightly joy.

The joker in this otherwise conventionally Austro-German deck was John Adams’ “Road Movies,” a bit of a precursor to an all-Adams program, with Adams conducting, scheduled for the full orchestra in two weeks. “Road Movies” is a generally groove-oriented suite for violin and piano from 1995 with a lovely reflective center. It is always interesting to hear Adams, a master of orchestral color, working in a more stripped-down context.

Violinist Elizabeth Baker and pianist Vicki Ray parsed the recycling motivic swirls carefully, dry in sound but rhythmically inflected, tense through the counting minefields but serene in contemplation.