MUSIC REVIEW : Chamber Series Opens at Ford

Symphonic pops piped through loudspeakers got you down?

There is help available--in the form of the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre’s “Chamber Music Under the Stars,” which opened its all too brief season Monday night with a sparkling concert from Los Angeles Philharmonic musicians.

Here, intimate music-making meets the great outdoors. On this occasion, the Philharmonic players performed without amplification and, save for a couple of flyovers, were easily heard. What’s more, they dared a non-pops agenda: two bona fide rarities even turned up on the first half of the program.

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Shostakovich’s 1931 Diptych for string quartet was one of them, a work encapsulating this composer’s extremes: the opening Elegy a sinewy arch of melancholy, the following Polka a wrong-note farce complete with pratfalls and pies in the face. A quartet headed by violinist Lyndon Johnston Taylor savored both moods.

Violist Dale Hikawa Silverman and pianist Zita Carno got things started with Hindemith’s 1919 Viola Sonata, a somewhat meandering, surprisingly Frenchified work from the then-24-year-old German composer, nicely understated and detailed by the performers.

After intermission, what made Brahms’ Piano Quartet, Opus 60, remarkable was the willingness of the musicians to delve into its quiet recesses, and the propulsive, interactive pianism of guest Joanne Pearce-Martin.

The piece is full of forceful rhetoric, from grand despair to longing sentiment, rather easy marks for many performers. But these players earned their way to the highs and lows, in a wonderfully unhurried, unforced and intelligent reading. Everything was just so.