L.A. Chamber Orchestra Ends Its Season in High Style

Season-closing concerts tend to also be stock-taking occasions. When the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra capped 2001-2002 over the weekend, it celebrated the end of a season that had taken it to Carnegie Hall (in April). At Glendale’s Alex Theatre on Saturday (it also performed Sunday at Royce Hall), LACO showed why it’s a shining feature in L.A.’s cultural landscape.

The programming was shipshape, with a nicely balanced, history-hopping agenda. Haydn’s Horn Concerto No. 1 combined with a tuneful blast of Tchaikovsky, Samuel Barber’s rueful Violin Concerto and, most importantly, a substantial world premiere, not just the usual token concert-opener. Composer Kenneth Frazelle’s five-movement Concerto for Chamber Orchestra was commissioned by LACO; it returns the favor by showcasing the ensemble’s strengths, its tautness and polish.

Frazelle fashioned a piece in an accessible, tonal, pleasingly familiar language. There are echoes of Copland, Barber and perhaps Bernstein, especially in the “West Side Story”-ish rock rhythms of the movement called “Tears/Tears.” Perhaps too, Hollywood’s influence colored the proceedings, which sometimes settled too lightly, too sweetly, on the ears.

But the Concerto is ultimately a complex concoction, a tangle of sometimes disarming tensions and releases in search of a cohesive whole. By its heroic yet also unsettled final movement, “Glare,” it is music desperately seeking closure. As such, it may be music for these fragile, hopeful times.

Elsewhere on the program, soloists from the LACO ranks came forward impressively. Hornist Richard Todd was moving in the graceful passion of the Haydn’s Adagio. Cellist Douglas Davis gave a singing, creamy account of Tchaikovsky’s Andante Cantabile. And violinist Margaret Batjer closed the evening, and the season, on a reflective, powerful note, in a performance of the Barber as notable for its subtlety as its technical aplomb.