L.A. Chamber shakes it up

Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra music director Jeffrey Kahane yielded the podium to a friend Saturday at the Alex Theatre in Glendale. Joseph Swensen, principal conductor of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, took over for a bracing, three-part program, with Kahane the exciting soloist in a Chopin concerto.

The new piece was James MacMillan’s “I (Meditation on Iona),” another of his effective revivals of the 19th century tone poem. The work paints the story of a 6th century Irish priest arriving at Iona, a small island among the Hebrides off the coast of Scotland. The priest, Colm Cillie, Christianizes Iona, and it becomes a place of pilgrimage.

Liszt could have taken up the subject, composing music full of faithful resolution, stormy seas, battlefield derring-do and final triumph, with the orchestra soaring in a big hymn tune.

How different is MacMillan’s work. The writing is spare. The ideas are elusive. The landscape is hostile and barren. The triumph of faith consists of a slight but felt shift deep in bedrock.

MacMillan banished winds and brass. That left strings and an array of percussion, including tubular bells, a thunder machine and two steel oil drums cut to different lengths.

He used the thunder machine -- a huge piece of flexible metal suspended in a large frame -- sparingly but effectively. Only once did percussionist Thomas Raney rattle the metal to simulate the crack of thunder. Elsewhere, the percussionist drew a string bass bow across the metal to evoke an eerie, disembodied wail.

The steel drums, also used sparingly, pounded out accents of menace, suggesting rocky shores, resistance to change and maybe determination.

The strings rarely massed together other than in recurring tremolo crescendos that created ominous sweeps of tension. Usually, the sections played as chamber groups, with the leaders taking solos or joining one another in duets and trios. MacMillan wasn’t afraid to use complete silences either.

The evocative work, lasting about 13 minutes, was commissioned by Swensen’s group, which premiered it in 1996. The Orange County High School of the Arts Orchestra, led by Christopher Russell, grabbed it in 2000. The LACO performance was the first by a professional Southern California ensemble.

In Chopin’s lyrical Second Piano Concerto, Kahane proved a marvel of insight and variety -- forceful, poetic, urbane, playful and effortlessly virtuosic, whatever the piece demanded. Cheered by both audience and orchestra, he played Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat, Opus 55, No. 2, as an encore.

In the dry acoustic of the theater, unfortunately, the orchestra faded out more than usual in a Chopin concerto. There was little underscoring of Kahane’s phrases and moods.

Swensen closed the concert, however, with an alert and effective performance of Beethoven’s First Symphony. He minimized the composer’s eccentricities in the first movement, then increasingly emphasized them. As a result, the work seemed to close down one era and open up another.