Chamber season closes with a challenge

There were two concertos on the final Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra program of the season -- one new, the other relatively recent, both difficult, both written for instruments that don’t often receive that kind of spotlight.

The new work is worth getting to know, a Concerto for Clarinet and Chamber Orchestra by Robert Aldridge. It is a co-commission from the LACO and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra that was unveiled April 6 by the latter group.

Clarinetist David Singer, who performed the world premiere, reprised the solo part in the West Coast premiere at the Alex Theatre on Saturday night, with Jeffrey Kahane presiding on the podium.

Cast in three traditional movements, always agreeably rooted in tonality, Aldridge’s concerto gets off to an inspired, propulsive start and ends with teeming energy. But the most arresting section comes in the slow movement where, after a lyrical opening, a klezmer smear from the clarinet comes out of nowhere and the music becomes rowdy and ethnic, with the brasses joining in the fun. That’s nothing new -- Mahler pulled a similar stunt in the third movement of his First Symphony -- but with klezmer influences on the rise in new music, it must have been an irresistible urge to include them in a clarinet concerto.

Richard Strauss’ Horn Concerto No. 2, one of the miracles of the composer’s Indian summer (he was 78 when he wrote it in 1942), drapes its terrifying technical difficulties with a serenity that can be quite deceptive. But the traps are there, all right, to the point where even the virtuosity of French horn soloist Richard Todd and the LACO itself were stretched mightily. Perhaps as a result, the finale sounded cautious, held back, like tiptoeing through a minefield.

As a pre-concert treat for early birds, Todd and Kahane (at the piano) played an early, almost unknown Strauss andante, a sentimental salon piece with only a handful of typical Strauss affirmations in the piano part.

With these tough concertos out of the way, Kahane and his ensemble “relaxed” after intermission with Haydn’s “Oxford” Symphony, breezing through the piece swiftly, if not immaculately.