Chamber Festival Showcases Young Talent

Thursday evening the first International Laureates Chamber Music Festival, presented by the locally based Young Artists International, got underway with a motley but richly rewarding concert at the William Clark Memorial Library. A traveling event designed to showcase young musicians making the transition from the competition circuit to concert careers, the festival has at least succeeded in finding talent.

Ad hoc chamber music has its perils, but violinist Boris Brovtsyn-Gruzenberg, cellist Jonathan Karoly and pianist Robert Thies avoided most of them in a finely detailed, emotionally ripe reading of Tchaikovsky’s Opus 50. Every phrase was alive, with the dancing variations as compellingly motivated as the surrounding grief. The alert musicians interacted with finesse while projecting individual character with radiant, room-filling sound.

Paganini’s “Le Streghe” variations demonstrated that Alexandru Tomescu has a winsome command of every trick in the fiddler’s bag, from machine-gun left-hand pizzicato to sweet and pure fingered-harmonics in double-stops. Ysaye’s intense “Poeme Elegiaque” gave him a chance to apply his interpretive considerations to longer lines and more substantial sentiment, which he did to stunning effect.

His very capable accompanist was Valentina Lisitsa, who worked hard to clarify the rather tubby-sounding Steinway. Chopin’s “Andante Spianato and Grand Polonaise Brillante” allowed her full scope for coloristic and tempo indulgences, which she took freely, spinning out a rapt, moonstruck Andante and thundering proudly in the outsized virtuoso pomp of the Polonaise.

The generous program began with Johann Halvorsen’s florid arrangement of a Handel Passacaglia. Though stylistically implausible, the piece makes an unaccompanied duo of violin and viola really sound to maximum rhetorical impact, as Tomescu and Fumino Ando proved, playing off each other with sparkling precision and uninhibited flair.

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* Tonight, 8 p.m.: Raitt Hall, Pepperdine University, 24255 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu. Music by Dvorak, Enescu, Paganini, Mendelssohn. Sunday, 4 p.m.: Bing Theater, LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Music by Rachmaninoff, Ravel, Liszt, Chopin, others. Tuesday, 7 p.m.: Beverly Hills Public Library, 444 N. Rexford Drive. Music by Dvorak, Ysaye, Mendelssohn, Stravinsky, others. Thursday, 8 p.m.: Luckman Fine Arts Complex, Cal State L.A., 5151 State University Drive. Music by Handel, Franck, R. Strauss. Tickets: $15. (310) 281-3303.