Golijov, Chamber Society Open Skirball Hall

In April, the Skirball Cultural Center gave Los Angeles a new multipurpose hall, one purpose being for chamber music. And on Monday night, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Chamber Music Society moved in.

Not a traditional chamber but an amphitheater, on the scale of an operating theater or the Roman senate, the Ahmanson Hall, designed by Moshe Safdie, celebrates openness and flow into the lobby and beyond. The rake of the seats is steep. From my seat high up, the vista was panoramic, taking in the stage far below, part of the lobby and a sliver of the outdoors.

Given the limited music-reflecting surfaces, the sound proved surprisingly clean and focused, with a moderate amount of presence. That it is also bone dry was pleasing for wind instruments, less so for strings.

With luck, the hall will warm up acoustically, as materials settle. But the psychoacoustics--the openness, the lack of intimacy--will continue to tell the ear that it is in a cold, dramatic environment, not one that welcomes chamber music as well as the society’s former home, the Gindi Auditorium at the nearby University of Judaism.

The Philharmonic used the occasion to offer its most substantial look at Osvaldo Golijov, who is the orchestra’s composer-in-residence this season, thanks to the Music Alive program of the American Symphony Orchestra. The three-week residency, which also includes work in the schools, began last weekend with an orchestra piece and will be taken up again in the spring.

The 41-year-old Golijov is the hottest young composer in America, and the orchestra already seems reluctant to let him go at season’s end. Onstage Monday, managing director Deborah Borda announced that the Philharmonic will play a new Golijov violin concerto in the fall (his most celebrated piece, “La Pasion Segun San Marcos” (The Passion According to St. Mark), will also be included in the Eclectic Orange Festival next fall).

Golijov is best known for having forged a style that strikingly melds two cultures, that of his Jewish heritage and the Latin one of Argentina, where he grew up. But what was most interesting about the two pieces on the program, “Yiddishbbuk” and “The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind,” is just how much his moving to the United States in 1986 has helped make him the gloriously multicultural composer he has become.

“Yiddishbbuk,” a string quartet from 1992, is the work of a very young composer finding his voice. Fresh from studying with the American master of the eerie, ritualistic, spiritual gesture, George Crumb, Golijov squeezed bits of expressive melodic Jewish lamentation into what was still a crabbed, Modernist style as he commemorated three Nazi victims, evoked the Yiddish writer I.B. Singer, and memorialized Leonard Bernstein, all in an intense and often violent 15-minute score.

Two years later, Golijov threw the stylistic gates wide open, and the claustrophobia of this earlier piece is replaced by the unfettered expression in the larger clarinet quintet, “Isaac the Blind.” Some of the images are the same; Singer is alluded to again. But the musical range is now vast and spectacular.

The writing is grippingly, obsessively repetitive in the string quartet and breathtaking in the clarinet solo, which summons the world of klezmer. Michele Zukovsky, switching among clarinet, bass clarinet and basset horn, did not sound always at ease--this is a leap for a symphonic musician--but she was nonetheless a committed, dramatic and exciting soloist.

The second half of the program began with Villa-Lobos’ “Bachianas Brasileiras” No. 6, for flute and bassoon, captivatingly played by Catherine Ransomand Michele Grego, and ended with a refined performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet, Opus 18, No. 1. In each of the three works for string quartet, different players participated, some from the back rows of the string sections, and each quartet demonstrated, in its own way, that Philharmonic talent runs deep.