A Kahane lesson in piano history

The stage of Zipper Hall at the Colburn School of Performing Arts looked a little like a room in a music museum Thursday night.

On one side of the stage stood an 1829 Broadwood fortepiano; on the other, a modern Fazioli concert grand. It was like viewing a Ford Model A and a Lincoln Continental.

Jeffrey Kahane, music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, moved from one to the other in playing works by Mozart and Mendelssohn, as part of the orchestra’s Conversations chamber music series, in which performances are followed by questions from the audience.

The Broadwood was chronologically more appropriate for Mendelssohn’s Quartet for Piano and Strings in B minor, composed in 1824, than for Mozart’s Quintet for Piano and Winds, K. 452, written 40 years earlier, Kahane said from the stage. But he couldn’t play the virtuosic, sweeping Mendelssohn work on the Broadwood, he said sheepishly, because the keys were narrower and the action was different from the instruments he was used to.

With its smaller, wooden case and wood frame on which the strings are stretched, and its leather, rather than felt-covered hammers, the Broadwood sounds lighter, more percussive and less resonant than does a modern piano.

It simplified balance problems with oboist Allan Vogel, clarinetist Gary Gray, horn player Richard Todd and bassoonist Kenneth Munday. But it also narrowed the range of dynamic possibilities within a phrase, resulting in a performance more lapidary than nuanced.

Conversely, the Fazioli sometimes overpowered violinist Josefina Vergara, violist Sam Formicola and cellist Armen Ksajikian, although most of this passionate work, composed when Mendelssohn was all of 14, came through exuberantly.