From comic high notes to dark gloom

The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra concert at UCLA’s Royce Hall Sunday night did not make sense. Mannequins in the lobby displayed gowns courtesy of Judy Lee Design. The evening was titled “Italian Inflections,” but much of the music didn’t fit. The evening’s soloist, Jennifer Larmore, sounded like Jennifer Larmore, but she didn’t look like the well-known American mezzo-soprano. Segues -- from silliness to sadness -- shocked.

But music sometimes makes its own kind of sense. A listener was kept on emotional toes. Jeffrey Kahane, beginning his 11th season as music director, inspired superb playing. And it was, in the end, a meaningful concert, even if that meaning wasn’t the one advertised.

The gowns? A gesture for the opening of a new season, perhaps to compensate for the fact that devoted LACO audiences (Royce was nearly full) don’t dress for the occasion.

Italy? The first half of the printed program began and ended with comic Rossini. The middle two arias came from Mozart’s last opera, “La Clemenza di Tito,” which had an Italian libretto and concerns a Roman emperor, but the musical and spiritual inflections are late, great, Vienna-rooted Mozart.

Larmore? She’s had a makeover so radical as to be unrecognizable. She’s lost weight and is rail thin. Her hair has gone from straight and dark to wavy and lighter. No more the Southern belle, the Atlanta-born mezzo now appears more big-city sophisticate.

The change is also striking because Larmore has been somewhat eclipsed by a new generation of amazing mezzos. She still records scads, but her appearances these days are mainly in concert. An exception will be her first venture into Wagner when she appears in “Das Rheingold” with San Francisco Opera next June.

Sunday she relied on tried and true Rossini arias from “The Italian Girl in Algiers” and “Barber of Seville” that she’s undoubtedly sung hundreds of times. Some things haven’t changed. Her voice remains a delight, and her stage presence remains a curiosity. She operates at the extremes of stiff -- standing with her hands tensely at her side -- or hamming it up, with little in between.

Her Mozart might have benefited from slightly more inflection. “Deh, per questo” includes a solo clarinet (played by Joshua Ranz) and is as poignant as Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. Larmore’s sound here was plumy and her phrasing supple. But she jumped happily, flexibly and without looking back into “Una voce poco fa” from Rossini’s “Barber.” From there, no stopping her. An encore -- Victor Herbert’s prima donna parody, “Art Is Calling” -- was all camp. Larmore’s still here and still a little hard to parse. And she still deserves a place on the mezzo A-list, however impressive the competition.

That Kahane began the second half of the program with Peteris Vasks’ gloomy “Musica Dolorosa” -- far from Italy and far from anything remotely resembling fun -- was perhaps a reminder of how quickly comedy can turn to tragedy. The 12-minute requiem for strings was written in 1984 by Vasks, an unrelentingly somber Latvian minimalist, in memory of his sister, and Kahane dedicated Sunday’s performance to the monks who were murdered in Myanmar last week.

The strings cluster and break apart. Downward glissandos make the music feel as though it will sink of its own weight. Vasks’ strings penetrate the ear like an icy wind and chill the bones. Douglas Davis played the haunting cello solo in the middle. The moment the piece ended, someone behind me said loudly that it was the saddest music he had ever heard.

Then Schubert’s bouncy Third Symphony. This is teenage Schubert, full of lithe rhythms, but it opens with a slow, weighty introduction. Kahane played off the Vasks, giving that introduction a heaviness that might not have otherwise worked.

But when the movement proper began, the weight fell away like magic, and then the symphony took off. Explanations were not needed, be they of mannequins or Myanmar. Kahane made Schubert’s symphony the sound of being glad to be alive, and the statement was profound.

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mark.swed@latimes.com