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BSO Chamber Players stick to a polished charm

MUSIC REVIEW

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

January 24, 2012|By Matthew Guerrieri

The Boston Symphony Orchestra Chamber Players concert at Jordan Hall included… (STU ROSNER )

Like wine merchants, the Boston Symphony Orchestra Chamber Players have divided their season by country of origin. Sunday afternoon’s concert centered on Austria, specifically Vienna, and three of that city’s most celebrated resident composers. The chosen genre was that staple of decorous party music, rambling across dance-inspired movements, dialing down drama in favor of charm: the instrumental serenade.

With its key alone, Mozart’s Serenade in C minor (K. 388) hinted at a more stark dramatic profile than your average serenade. The performance, though with its consistently big sound and sharp-edged rhythmic profile, brought out extroverted theatricality and operatic playacting.

The ensemble - doubled oboes (John Ferrillo, Mark McEwen), clarinets (William Hudgins, Michael Wayne), horns (James Sommerville, Rachel Childers), and bassoons (Richard Svoboda, Richard Ranti) - savored the score’s dark, nearly orchestral hues. The opening Allegro raised the curtain with compact flourishes; the canonic “Menuetto’’ was wryly tense, dancers shooting daggers at each other across the ballroom.

Beethoven’s Serenade in D, Op. 25 was played for comedy, with flutist Elizabeth Rowe cast as a gracefully straight foil to violinist Malcolm Lowe and violist Steven Ansell’s goosed accents and amplified phrasing. In the central Allegro molto, Lowe and Ansell bowed with a vigor sufficient to burlesque the image of a virtuoso; in the Allegro scherzando, the trio skidded through Beethoven’s skipping, syncopated rhythmic misdirection with glee. The Allegro vivace finale was even faster, leaving any lingering Classical-era propriety - and, here and there, the actual music - in the dust.

The second half brought Johannes Brahms’s Serenade in D, Op. 11, published for full orchestra, but performed here in British composer Alan Boustead’s nine-player conjectural reconstruction of the original, lost chamber version. Even in miniature, one could sense how Brahms was using the serenade form to sidestep the burden of the post-Beethoven symphony. The opening, rustic string drones and a cheerful horn call, signal the essential Gemütlichkeit of the whole piece, symphonic in size but decidedly unassuming in scope.

The performance was lovely, burnished and rich, but the music’s easygoing low-tension polish - every edge rounded off, every phrase balanced like a checkbook - eventually dominated. Having visited Mozart’s dark woods and Beethoven’s sprightly garden, the concert seemed to end in a greenhouse: lush, orderly, sealed off and a little bit sleepy.