Talented Ensemble Makes for Good, Clean Fun

Three brilliant virtuosos guaranteed the success of last Friday's Bank-Boston Celebrity Series concert. Leila Josefowicz, a violinist who has survived being branded a child prodigy, performed in two concertos. Andreas Haefliger, a Mozart specialist, was the pianist in another. Jaime Laredo, darling of countless Sony recording projects, conducted the Brandenburg Ensemble and joined Josefowicz as a soloist. All the repertoire was light and bright and ideally suited to the orchestra.

Bach's Concerto for Two Violins was a useful way to compare Josefowicz and Laredo. Though she came closer to technical perfection (his bowing suffered slightly from his need to conduct), he blended more fully with the ensemble. Though she was more visibly enthusiastic in performance, he was more vigorous in the fast outer movements.

Their perfect accord in the largo made for the greatest single movement of the evening. This sky-scrapingly beautiful duet is one of Bach's greatest achievements, presaging the slow movements of Mozart violin concertos and Beethoven piano concertos. Standing there, gazing at each other, Josefowicz and Laredo looked like intense conversation partners who just happened to be holding violins: Sensitive to the largo's lullaby cadences, Laredo nudged the ensemble to produce a tender, if totally subdued, accompaniment.

The E-flat piano concerto, K. 271, is Mozart's best such early work. It shows a surprising willingness to disturb the conventionally perfect balance between soloist and orchestra and is driven mostly by the pianist, who must have great endurance. Haefliger, who played with an accompanist's ear when necessary, gracefully allowed Laredo to rescue the concerto from merely unilateral appeal.

The first melody made people smile, not just because of its unwitting affinity to the orchestral part of Carmen's "Habanera," but also because the piano sounded fantastic. The Steinway trilled and sang under Haefliger's fingers, projecting pianissimo lines that were clear no matter how loudly the orchestra played. But the lowest registers were almost over-responsive: Haefliger's loudest octaves sounded like they belonged in Liszt or Busoni, not Mozart.

This problem did not persist in the andantino of the second movement, a mostly dark and quiet meditation which the pianist delivered with intelligence. Haefliger, whose father Ernst is a great tenor, always imparted a vocal quality to the music, even in the note-heavy presto rondo. The cadenzas in both the first and third movements had dramatic as well as technical and even visual interest: Haefliger played with his eyes closed but turned toward the ceiling, and wore an expression of ecstatic concentration, his upper body resembling a bust of Homer. The orchestra that had commanded comparatively little attention for the majority of the piece came into its own toward the conclusion, matching Haefliger note for note.

Sunny and pleasing music continued in the second half of the program, which featured Josefowicz as the soloist in Haydn's first violin concerto. Since she has a technique that can handle the Tchaikovsky and Sibelius concertos, Josefowicz was not troubled by the simpler Haydn and focused on achieving beauty of tone. She made even spiccato bowings sound lovely. Her upper register was uniformly pure, and she was better than before at blending; she and Laredo made a good team.

This concerto has a late-classical sound unusual for music written fewer than twenty years after Bach's death. Though the structure and idiom of the middle movement were predictable, the finale was full of surprising figures and irregular phrases. The orchestra met the movement's polyphonic and rhythmic demands and maintained the character of the dance.

Of Mozart's symphonies without subtitles, his 29th is the second most widely performed, after the 40th. Rather than suffering from overexposure, the symphony is still fresh on a sixth or seventh listen. Its attractively slight orchestration calls for strong individual performances of the sort that the Brandenburg Ensemble was especially prepared to offer. After three second-billings in a row, the group gave an authoritative reading of each of the four movements.

Laredo seems to be a better symphony conductor than a concerto conductor, since the Mozart offered him a chance to think like the concertmaster he used to be. The strings were together and the winds were together. If Laredo's choice of tempi was often less than daring, he made up for it by successfully turning the minuet into a scherzo. He seemed to want the fourth movement to sound like Mendelssohn's "Italian" symphony, with pleasing results.

Throughout the piece, as throughout the concert, the musicians seemed to be having fun. At its best, the Brandenburg Ensemble, historically connected with the Marlboro Festival Orchestra, evoked the sound of that group's best recordings under Pablo Casals.

The BankBoston Celebrity Series continues to showcase superb artists in accessible repertoire for a price lower than that of ordinary BSO Concerts. In the upcoming months, classical music lovers can look forward to Cecilia Bartoli, the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Julian Bream and Itzhak Perlman.