Marriner’s Direction Gives New Flavor to the Familiar

Just seven weeks ago, a touring orchestra arrived at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts with those familiar favorites, Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, placed safely on the menu like a hamburger and fries.

Friday night, at the same venue, there they were again, touring orchestra, hamburger and fries, the only difference being the orchestra. This time it was the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, conducted by its founder, Sir Neville Marriner. Difference enough.

Without disparaging those earlier performances, Friday’s were simply world-class. Terrific stuff. If you’re going to play this music again, play it like you mean it. Marriner and the Academy meant it.

The 73-year-old conductor led a well considered but extremely vital and involving account of the Seventh. It was no one thing that he did, but a slew of right little things accumulated. His tempo in the first movement hit bull’s-eye center of the groove, slow enough for the rhythms to speak, fast enough for visceral effect. His inflection of phrase, an elocution lesson, was completely alive to meaning, direction and place in the overall narrative.

His richly varied color and dynamic scheme in the Allegretto captured the ins and outs of its ruminations. And on and on. The orchestra responded with perfect warmth, clarity and poise but never stuffy manners--a transparency achieved entirely without aridity.

Violinist Leila Josefowicz, 19, revisited the Mendelssohn concerto and made it jump to attention. It’s not old hat to her. She brought deluxe tone, springing gestures and pulsating intensity to the task, and sounded wrapped up in it.

Suppe’s Overture to “Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna,” dispatched with curt professionalism, seemed a too inconsequential opener.