Chamber society finds its labors amplified at mansion

The Tiffany glass dome and marble floor in the Pompeian Room at the Doheny Mansion act like an amplifier. Even a small group of musicians there can make a mighty sound. The three Los Angeles Philharmonic Chamber Society ensembles that performed Sunday afternoon, under the auspices of the Da Camera Society, made a very mighty sound. That’s not always what you want in chamber music.

Of the three works on the program, Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll,” the composer’s surprise early-morning 33rd birthday present for his wife, Cosima, received the most touching, intimate performance. It wasn’t always note-perfect, but it was expressive and very human.

You could see the 13 musicians working together. That isn’t meant to suggest there was any strain. But it was good to be reminded that beauty, as Yeats said, is labor.

A different group of musicians gave Mendelssohn’s wondrous Octet, composed when he was 16, a speedy, virtuoso performance. It was glittering in its precision, impassioned but driven. One wished only that the musicians had allowed themselves some liberties in tempo, some Old World ebb and flow and distinctions in phrasing. Some schmaltz. Not a lot, but enough to shift the emphasis a bit away from the group’s remarkable cohesion and more onto the expressive possibilities of the music.

Except for the perhaps inevitable loud dynamic in the room, Schubert’s Octet, which closed the program, was a happy compromise, individual in expression and crackerjack in ensemble.

In this remarkable six-movement work, Schubert proved himself a master of past styles without losing his distinctive personality -- the worthy heir of Beethoven in the third movement and Haydn in the fourth. And in the second movement, which received a magical reading, he showed that, like Mozart, he could take a simple folk-style tune and in a few measures evoke the tears behind the smile. The final movement achieved symphonic stature.

The concert was a preview of the chamber music programs the Los Angeles Philharmonic musicians will play later this month at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland. One hopes they’ll play in a larger venue that will allow the musicians to explore more subtleties.