Music Reviews : Carver, Mozart Orchestra at Wilshire-Ebell Theatre

The program by the Los Angeles Mozart Orchestra in Wilshire-Ebell Theatre Saturday night was not of the sort in which one expected interpretive revelations, made up as it was of early Haydn, early Mozart and whatever-period (it doesn’t matter) Salieri.

This was, rather, an occasion calling for the music to be kept in motion via a clear beat, natural balances--the bass line light and crisp, to allow the upper voices free flight--and, of course, clean execution.

For the most part, Lucinda Carver, the young USC-trained conductor, and her 20 charges met these requirements handsomely. Still, they could not keep the evening from sounding just a bit on the bland side, what with 10 consecutive movements in major keys.

Why, too, is there any need to program a work as tediously predictable as Salieri’s Sinfonia in D (“Veneziana”) except to show what we already knew: that Mozart was probably a superior composer moments after his birth than Salieri was after a lifetime of polishing his craft?

Under any circumstances, the Salieri was neatly and quickly dispatched while, in closing the program, Carver and the ensemble presented Mozart’s Symphony in A, K. 201, in a reading that was lively, clean-textured and sweet in tone.

The evening’s problems were confined to Haydn’s C-major Cello Concerto, whose genial facade masks a measure of subtle melancholy while providing a virtuoso workout for its protagonist.

Kevin Torfeh, otherwise a principal of the orchestra, negotiated the Moderato opening with bright-toned wit and sufficient security, but the rhythmic line went limp--both in the solo and in Carver’s accompaniment--in the slow movement, while the athletic demands of the dashing finale seemed beyond Torfeh’s technical capabilities.