Music Reviews : Rifkin, Bilson Guests at Chamber Group Opener

After six weeks of living an energetic, performance-filled life playing for Music Center Opera, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, which began its own season at Ambassador Auditorium, seemed less than vigorous.

Blame the conductor. This ensemble, one of the more enthusiastic and responsive orchestras in the state, usually reflects the personality of the person in charge on any particular occasion. This week, the leader is ragtime and Bach specialist Joshua Rifkin, making his first appearances with the orchestra.

Rifkin’s program, scheduled to be repeated tonight at the Japan America Theatre, is an intriguing one on the page, offering colorful, early Classical-period symphonies by J.C. Bach and Haydn, and keyboard concertos by Mozart and C.P.E. Bach. In performance, it doesn’t work.

Or didn’t work Wednesday night, when a festive audience in the Pasadena showplace was treated to untidy and unmotivated readings of works apparently lacking in charm and wit. Experience tells us the lack is not in the composers.

What the 27-member ensemble played best was the evening’s closer, Haydn’s Symphony No. 78, given, despite Rifkin’s windmill-tilting conducting style, a well-paced, sensible run-through. Not all the contrasts came into focus and not all the details shone, but the piece emerged neatly enough.

At the other end of the program, J.C. Bach’s Sinfonia in G minor, a wondrous and eccentric relic of 1770, exposed what was probably a serious lack of rehearsal; it certainly revealed the difficulty this resourceful orchestra must have had in following this guest conductor. Nevertheless, the placement of the two symphonies on this agenda could be justified.

The inclusion of Mozart’s first original piano concerto, usually called No. 9, also made sense. It is, as is well known by now--40 years ago it was not--irresistible and cherishable, songful, ebullient and virtuosic.

Fortepianist Malcolm Bilson, however, seemed to downplay all its virtues, in a performance of dutiful regularity. The piece we have long considered irrepressibly jaunty became merely pedestrian. With a prevailing lack of imagination, Rifkin and the orchestra contributed erratically to this impression.

Superfluous in this context was the inclusion of a novelty, C.P.E. Bach’s Concerto in E-flat for Harpsichord and Fortepiano (1788), a fragmented, episodic and ambivalent work of strange timbres and oddball textures. Weird, yes; wonderful, hardly. Conductor Rifkin presided from the harpsichord. Bilson, seated far upstage, and not visible to large portions of the audience, played the complicated and showy fortepiano solos in a frenzy of reliability.

Before the scheduled program, Rifkin conducted the orchestra in Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, in memory of Leonard Bernstein, who died Sunday.