Music Reviews : Camerata Ends Season With Energy to Spare

NEWPORT BEACH — The Mozart Camerata closed its season with polished performances brimming with verve Sunday afternoon at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church.

Music director Ami Porat lent center stage to Misha Lefkowitz for the entire first half of the concert. However, the programming did not signal a retreat by the orchestra, which partnered the violinist as a responsive equal--lilting and tidy during Dvorak’s Romance in F minor, Opus 11 (incorrectly identified in the program as “Romance in F”), well-balanced and sympathetic during works by Saint-Saens/Ysaye and Pablo Sarasate.

As the featured soloist, Lefkowitz, a longtime member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, brought an unpretentious reliability to bear. Not one to permit himself excessive liberties in pacing, he approached the Romance with a straightforward, leisurely quality, imparted gentle humor to Ysaye’s virtuosic “Caprice d’apres l’Etude en forme de valse”--a fluffy elaboration of Saint-Saens’ Etude in waltz form, from his Opus 52 set--and dispatched Sarasate’s Introduction and Tarantella, Opus 43, with authority.

*

The major offering of the evening was Bizet’s Symphony in C, written in 1855 when the composer was only 17. Porat commanded an exuberant reading, concise, playful and robust, with few technical inconsistencies. Principal oboist Leanne Becknell luxuriated in the long cantilena of the Adagio, during which she received attentive echoes from within the woodwind section.