No-Frills Mozart Strikes Pleasing Notes

The charming thing about Ami Porat’s Mozart Classical Orchestra is its focus and simplicity. This is an ensemble that has a mission and performs it without frills or marketing tricks.

At the Irvine Barclay Theatre on Friday, the Orange County-based chamber orchestra offered a megadose of Mozart--a classically balanced program of overture, concerto and symphony--with characteristically solid, pleasing performances.

The best music of the night was in the second half: Mozart’s Symphony No. 35 in D, the “Haffner.” Like Beethoven’s Fifth, this work suffers from over-familiarity. We know it so well that we may forget to listen.

But it’s often programmed for a reason: This symphony is brimming with good tunes.

In the first movement, the violins were buoyant and fluid from the start, dashing through the opening runs and trills. Rhythmic ensemble was impeccable in the stately second movement, with players closely locked into a long, slow pulse. And the final allegro was both clean and dramatic, with dynamic contrasts carefully executed.

The orchestra was just as trim, if perhaps a bit more tentative, in the first work of the evening, the overture to Mozart’s “Abduction From the Seraglio.” This famously energetic opener--”I doubt whether anyone . . . could go to sleep over it,” Mozart wrote his father as he was composing it--was perfectly in place, though a bit stiff.

Sara Andon, featured in the middle work of the concert, provided a lovely performance of Mozart’s Flute Concerto in D--a work that shouldn’t be half as successful as it is. Not only did Mozart dislike the instrument, but he also whipped up this concerto in a hurry by rewriting an earlier oboe concerto to fill a commission.

Andon was most effective in the slow movement, where she was lyrical and her tone lustrous. In the quicker first and third movements, she was often covered by the orchestra and once or twice let the fast notes get ahead of her fingers.

Porat, the conductor, was a model of restraint: Apart from expansive gestures in more sweeping passages and a neat little bow to the audience, he engaged in none of the stage theatrics favored by many conductors.

He graciously shared applause with the players, asking principals to acknowledge the audience.

And, best of all, he didn’t talk.

Apart from introducing the encore--itself a restrained choice, a repeat of the last movement of the symphony--he let the music say all that needed to be said.