Bringing Out the Best From a Teen Mozart

For the final concert of its 14th season, Ami Porat’s Mozart Classical Orchestra took three works by the teenage Mozart and recaptured some of the excitement that audiences must have experienced when they heard them for the first time more than 200 years ago.

Before a modest crowd at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church on a gray Sunday afternoon in Newport Beach, music director Porat led the orchestra’s 30 players in performances of an overture, a concerto and a symphony that featured urgent speeds, elegant phrasing and a rich sense of drama.

At a time when many modern-instrument orchestras seem intimidated by the ascendancy of historically based performance practice using period instruments, it was refreshing to hear the musical authority that can still emanate from orthodox forces such as Porat’s.

The centerpiece of the concert was Mozart’s 30-minute Concertone (literally, “large concerto”) for Two Violins and Orchestra, also featuring important parts for oboe and cello.

The lushly orchestrated music, rich with melody and harking back to similarly hedonistic concertos for mixed instruments by composers such as J.C. Bach, can be a sonic wallflower if played too amiably.

But the orchestra’s enthusiastic commitment, Porat’s forceful handling and outstanding performances by the excellent solo quartet--violinists Olivia Tsui and Irina Voloshina, oboist Cheryl Foster and cellist Vage Ayrikian--gave the music the dimensions of a major event.

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The first movement in particular, with its sweet harmonies and exciting technical challenges, functioned as a showcase for the soloists’ brilliant virtuosity. Tsui, with her dark-toned playing, and Voloshina, whose work was more extroverted, brighter-hued, held the stage with their musical dialogue, while oboist Foster performed miracles with her deceptively difficult part. The movement was capped by an elegant 18th century cadenza that Tsui and Voloshina adorned with the kind of 20th century maverick additions that might have infuriated scholars but clearly delighted the audience.

During the slow second movement, with its chains of beautiful ideas generously distributed among the four soloists, time seemed to be suspended. As they almost always do, however, and despite everyone’s energetic efforts, the routine workings out of the work’s third movement, an uninspired minuet, let the side down.

After intermission, the concert ended with the light, exhilarating strains of Mozart’s Symphony No. 30, K. 202. Like the overture to “Il re pastore” that opened the program, the pleasant but forgettable symphony made its entrances and exits with charm and brio.

In response to enthusiastic applause at concert’s end, Porat and the strings of the orchestra played an incongruous chestnut as an encore, an arrangement of the Intermezzo from Mascagni’s opera “Cavalleria Rusticana.”

‘A little bit on the weepy side,” one member of the audience commented afterward. And, he might have added, the very antithesis of Mozart.