Music Reviews : Perick Opens L.A. Chamber Season With World Premiere of Powell Work

The concert Friday at Royce Hall opened not just a new season for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, but a new era. Pre-concert fanfares heralded the first concert of Christof Perick’s tenure as music director, which significantly began with the world premiere of a major work from an American composer.

Mel Powell’s “Settings” for small orchestra was co-commissioned by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the New Jersey Symphony and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. Since the local composer’s last, big--very big--orchestral work, “Duplicates,” garnered the 1990 Pulitzer for composition, this premiere attracted considerable attention.

“Settings” repaid the notice, with interest. It conveys all the aural revelry of “Duplicates,” but across a less daunting bandwidth. It seems particularly close, in style, spirit and textures, to the middle movements of “Duplicates.”

Part I of “Settings” exploits the diversity-within-unity paradox of pure chamber music, passing polyphonic conversations of urbane hocket through the string sections and small wind band. In Part II, the talk turns into dance, flexing concerted muscles with bravura abandon.

Connecting the sections is a short clarinet solo, delivered with quiet control by Gary Gray. The sonic heir to the alto flute solo in “Duplicates,” however, is the expressive wonder assigned the solo viola, played with the perfect combination of energy and eloquence by Roland Kato.

The Chamber Orchestra made Powell’s complex machinery purr. Under Perick’s cogent leadership, gracefully sculpted details drove, rather than braked, the purposeful sweep of the work.

Perick closed his program with a nod toward his own roots, in the form of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4. The conductor is clearly aware of period-practice preachments for this repertory, and confident enough not to regard them as incontrovertible dogma.

The result Friday was an explosive, uncompromised performance predicated on the sonic reality of modern instruments and virtuosity.

Which is not to say it was in any way reactionary--on the contrary, it was a remarkably stimulating and cohesive interpretation. Perick is one conductor who attends as intelligently to the ends of phrases as to their beginnings.

The winds interjected some dissenting ideas about intonation in the middle movements, and Perick’s crackling tempo in the finale proved impossible to maintain, but on the whole the orchestra responded with crisp authority.

In the featured solo spot was Anne Akiko Meyers, with a cool, fluent account of Mozart’s Violin Concerto in G, K. 216, ably accompanied. Her choice of the Sam Franko cadenza for the first movement underlined her conventional, mainstream approach, generous in vibrato and touches of portamento.