Chamber Heads East on an Eclectic Note

About to head East this week on a tour highlighted by an appearance in Carnegie Hall, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra has not packed lightly or neatly. In a preview concert at the Alex Theatre on Saturday, it crammed a program full to the bursting point.

Beginning with one of Haydn’s last, loudest, funniest and most accomplished symphonies, Jeffrey Kahane went on to conduct a death-transcending Bach cantata for solo baritone, exquisitely melancholic songs by Ravel and a neglected 20th century orchestral showpiece by the Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera.

The soloist, and clearly a major attraction for the tour, was the baritone, Thomas Quasthoff, who also managed to fit in an encore of “Ol’ Man River.” On the road, Quasthoff will replace three brief Ravel songs with another Bach cantata, “Ich habe genug” (It is enough), three times as long as the Ravel. But even without this additional transcendental cantata, there was quite enough Saturday.

Perhaps succumbing to the law of diminishing returns, Haydn’s Symphony No. 102, as overambitious curtain-raiser, made the least impression in a tidy performance that managed to be frisky without being particularly amusing. Things could go better elsewhere, given that the Alex has a dry, uninvolving acoustic, and it can take time for the audience to settle into the music. The slow movement, one of Haydn’s loveliest, was, however, graciously played.

Even Quasthoff made an awkward first impression. Bach’s cantata, “Ich will den Kreuzstab gerne tragen” (I will bear the cross with gladness), begins in torment of physical suffering, with the composer quickly wiping away the tears as the music miraculously reveals the heavenly comfort and liberation of death. It is possible that the German baritone, who has miraculously transcended his own physical limitations by having become one of the most convincing singers before the public, was attempting to overcompensate for the Alex’s acoustic when he at first showed unusual strain in the upper registers.

But as the music became more comforting, so did he seem more comfortable. And in the second aria, in which the liberated soul soars like an eagle, the thrill was back as an ecstatic Quasthoff rode on the contrapuntal wings of Allan Vogel’s oboe solo.

Opening the second half of the program with Ravel’s three short, wistful songs, “Don Quichotte a Dulcinee,” the composer’s last music, Quasthoff was in full command of every tonal and textural nuance. He slightly overplays the drunkenness of the third song, in which the lovelorn Spanish knight loses himself in drink, but it works nonetheless. There was a lightness here that, in ways I’m not sure I understand, managed to pick up where Bach left off. And, in ways I understand even less, Quasthoff, coming dangerously close to affectation with his jazz inflections, made “Ol’ Man River” a goose-bump-raising culmination of all the emotion in Bach and Ravel.

The last time Kahane and his orchestra attempted the “Variaciones Concertantes”--Ginastera’s characterful 1953 series of variations written in a national Argentine style on a haunting extended melody for solo cello--was at L.A. Chamber Orchestra’s 30th anniversary concert in 1998. The performance was rough. This time it was splendid, its tone set by the rich sound of cellist Douglas Davis, and culminating in a furious and fabulous swirl of energy for the ending gaucho dance. Let’s hope that East Coast audiences will be patient as the chamber orchestra unpacks its bulging suitcases.