MUSIC REVIEW : Mozart Orchestra at Forest Lawn

The Los Angeles Mozart Orchestra is to be applauded for finding a strong, offbeat program with which nominally to honor its namesake during Deathfest 200.

For the orchestra’s memorial concert, presented on Saturday in the Hall of Liberty at the Hollywood Hills Forest Lawn cemetery, conductor Lucinda Carver offered compositions Mozart created for the Masonic lodges to which he belonged: two radiant cantatas, “Die Mauererfreude,” K. 471, and “Eine kleine Freimaurer-Kantate,” K. 623 (his last completed work), both extolling brotherhood and intellectual enlightenment, and the crushing Funeral Music, K. 477.

Carver, as indicated in previous outings, is a lively, probing musician. She brings a pertinent rhythmic sense to her task and has an ear for Mozartean style.

What she was unable to do on Saturday was draw extended spans of homogeneous--not to say accurate--playing from her band. The players seemed pushed beyond their limits for much of the evening. The Cambridge Singers were, however, effective (and together) in their brief choral exhortations.

The most coherent playing of the evening came in the Funeral Music, where there are no fast passages for the strings to negotiate and where the plangent tones of winds inevitably make a powerful effect.

The program opened with “Eine kleine Nachtmusik” and closed with a rarity, the Symphony in C, K. 128, which normally threatens to change key signature eight times in its bristling opening movement. On this occasion it seemed to modulate unceasingly, with dissonances not even Mozart at his most avant-garde would have countenanced.

Both works were conducted affectionately, if hardly with the requisite command (in K. 128, at any rate), by that likable and gifted actor, David Ogden Stiers of “MASH” fame.