Gardner’s impressive debut at LACO

At 32, Edward Gardner is part of the swarm of young conductors that seems to be sweeping the world. He may be a little long in the tooth for the L.A. Philharmonic -- given its track record of hiring 26-year-olds -- but the English National Opera has snapped him up as its new music director, and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra got him for his West Coast debut Saturday night at the Alex Theatre.

Gardner looks like a fine catch too, since he has a knack for constructing internally interlocking programs, a good ear for inner detail, a solid beat and, like many other British conductors, great verbal skills. He spoke engagingly, even breathlessly, about placing the Mozart Oboe Concerto between two Schoenberg-influenced “high-octane” pieces -- John Adams’ Chamber Symphony and Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonietta -- thus separating “the energetic dogs.”

The Adams has become standard repertory in a remarkably short period and has developed a varied performance history. Gardner let it rip just a bit faster than the composer’s own jaunty tempo, drawing forth a plethora of detail revealing that Stravinsky had a greater influence on this work than Schoenberg did (especially the former’s Octet).

Britten’s Sinfonietta is an Opus 1, written when he was only 19, yet it has the Britten sound from its opening bars, along with the composer’s propensity for brooding and ambiguous tonality. Ultimately, it doesn’t stack up as a teenage masterpiece -- Britten had found his voice but not yet his inspiration -- but Gardner made an energetically persuasive case for it.

LACO’s peerless principal oboist, Allan Vogel, did some wonderfully smooth, eloquent, full-blooded persuading of his own in the Mozart, welding his own cadenzas tightly to the themes of each movement, accompanied brightly and pointedly by Gardner.

The conductor concluded the evening with a swift, youthfully raucous Beethoven Symphony No. 8 that mirrored the speed and high spirits of the Adams and Britten. The Beethoven sound of surprise was clearly in Gardner’s head -- he gave the humorously cranky pauses plenty of space -- though he couldn’t solve the inevitable problem in chamber-sized Beethoven of the winds and brasses shouting down a thin string corps. Nevertheless, an impressive debut overall.