Last-Minute Soloist Shines

Nearing the close of their annual summer residency in the L.A. area, Eduard Schmieder and the young, multinational, highly accomplished I Palpiti Chamber Orchestra observed the Jascha Heifetz centenary with an out-of-the-ordinary program--some of which referred directly to Heifetz.

There was some unplanned drama at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre on Thursday. When violinist Erick Friedman was forced to cancel due to a family emergency, a member of the orchestra, Liza Kerob--a concertmistress of the Monte Carlo Philharmonic--had to learn the solo part of Martin Sweidel’s newly written “Heifetziana” on one day’s notice.

She pulled it off beautifully, revealing a display piece that paraphrased the close of a Heifetz concert, a seamlessly segued fantasy drifting from the last strains of the Beethoven Violin Concerto through a string of encores.

Astor Piazzolla’s “The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires” may lack the descriptive power of Vivaldi’s famous seasons, but it contains a healthy quota of the Argentine tangomeister’s distinctive rhythms and sentiment. For those familiar with Gidon Kremer’s Nonesuch recording of Leonid Desyatnikov’s tangy arrangement of Piazzolla’s cycle--as juxtaposed with Vivaldi’s--the unidentified version heard here seemed rather defanged.

Pianist Alex Slobodyanik and violinist Sayako Kusaka sailed with synchronistic elan through Mendelssohn’s Concerto in D Minor for Violin, Piano and Strings. And the orchestra displayed unified teamwork of its own in Stokowski’s transcription of the Preludio from J.S. Bach’s Partita in E.