Music Reviews : Belgium’s I Fiamminghi at Hollywood Roosevelt

I Fiamminghi, the 11-member Belgian string band that played the acoustically resplendent Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel for the Chamber Music in Historic Sites series Thursday, is a personable, accomplished lot.

Its ensemble sound is smooth without being pallid, the players’ intonation is excellent and it has a strong leader in Rudolf Werthen.

Werthen’s priorities are, however, puzzling. He would seem to be the group’s star violinist, as indicated by his sparkling solo work in the Romanian Dances of Bartok, directed from the concertmaster’s stand (only the two cellists sit while delivering). Yet in the one component of the popsy program demanding the services of a powerhouse fiddler, the Mendelssohn Octet, Werthen opted to conduct his ensemble with two hands, in a performance that was orderly to the point of blandness.

Little could be faulted technically in Enrique Raudales’ occasionally submerged first violin, but this was hardly the passionately soaring leading voice that one imagines Werthen would have supplied.

Werthen also seemed to feel (mistakenly) that his charges could not have negotiated the mundane measures of Respighi’s third suite of “Ancient Airs and Dances” without his hand signals. But then, in this program composed almost entirely of staples for strings, he did pick up fiddle to spearhead a lithe dash through Mozart’s Divertimento in D, K. 136.

The two relative novelties of the evening: a transcription for viola and strings of Faure’s once-ubiquitous song “Apres un reve,” with Mark Tooten the elegantly soulful soloist, and, as the single encore, a witty sendup of Johann Strauss’ “Pizzicato Polka.”