Music Reviews : L.A. Chamber Orchestra Opens Season

One day after muralist Kent Twitchell unveiled the start of his project to turn the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra into an outsized icon overlooking the Harbor Freeway, music director Iona Brown drew a more questionable musical portrait of Vivaldi in the ensemble’s season-opening program Wednesday at Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena.

(The program was a repeat of a July concert at Hollywood Bowl.)

With more starts and stops than in a Bruckner symphony, with more diverse bowing techniques than in a 19th-Century violin concerto, with a numbing Grave and a generalized Allegro appearing to be her favorite tempos, Brown as soloist and conductor managed to make “The Four Seasons” eccentric and virtually interminable.

Dressed in a sleeveless, off-the-shoulders bridal gown, Brown played with flashy, detailed technique and accuracy. Interpretation, not competence was the issue. Her best moments occurred in the tempestuous close of “Summer” and the gentle cantilena of “Winter.”

But she also played with such mannered indulgence of tempo, dynamics and extension of line that the composer’s programmatic music turned abstract and intellectualized.

The orchestra followed her lead with vigor, precision and commendable if dispiriting adherence to the most minute vagaries of her wayward interpretation. Periodically, cellist Douglas Davis managed to emerge as more than a rote, inexpressive continuo player.

Abstraction was a quality also common to the interpretations of the three concertos that opened the program. David Shostac and Susan Greenberg tootled fluently as soloists in the Concerto in C for Two Flutes, RV 553, but they seemed boxed in by a general decision to address the composer’s constantly varying details without similarly alert, flexible change.

As one of the soloists in the Concerto Grosso in B minor for Four Violins, Opus 3, No. 10, Brown played with muscular attack and phrasing oddly not evident in the playing of her soloist colleagues: concertmaster Ralph Morrison, Jacqueline Brand and principal second violinist Rene Mandel.

Only in the Concerto in F for Oboe, RV 455, did soloist Allan Vogel manage almost successfully to break through the straight-jacketing, especially in the joyful, skipping theme of the final movement.