Montreal Chamber Ensemble Displays Energy at Barclay

I Musici de Montreal, a chamber ensemble of 14 musicians, made its first Orange County appearance Monday with an eclectic five-part program at the Irvine Barclay Theatre. The group was led with boundless energy by Yuli Turovsky, otherwise familiar as the cellist in the Borodin Trio.

Two works marked the high points of the concert: Jose Evangelista’s “Airs d’Espagne,” a richly pungent and gritty setting of 15 folk melodies from Spain, and a virtually ideal performance of Copland’s Concerto for Clarinet, Piano, Harp and Strings, with soloist Charles Neidich.

Neidich played the original version, which takes the soloist into the stratosphere and which the inestimable Benny Goodman, who commissioned the work, found beyond his powers. Then, in a dazzling display of circular breathing, Neidich played Paganini’s “Moto perpetuo” as an encore.

A vigorous, romantic but full-bodied performance of Mozart’s Divertimento in F, K. 138, revealed that the Canadian group gives little countenance to historically informed performance practices.

But an even more unfashionable style followed, with Beethoven’s “Serioso” Quartet as arranged by Mahler. This curious anomaly proved that a difference in degree results in a difference in kind. A chamber orchestra version of a string quartet is not simply a louder quartet; it is a thicker, coarser, far less persuasive beast altogether.

The concert opened with Turina’s “Serenata.” There were three encores: Boccherini’s Minuet; a tango by Astor Piazzolla; and Morton Gould’s arrangement of the spiritual “All God’s Children Got Wings.”