SITKA REVISITED : CHAMBER MUSIC/L.A. FEST BEGINS

The 7,381 residents of Sitka, Alaska, spend most of the year concentrating on fishing, canning and lumbering. For a few weeks each summer, however, the picturesque harbor town on Baranof Island becomes something of a chamber-music mecca, and a very sophisticated one at that.

It all began in 1972 when the violinist Paul Rosenthal and a number of his colleagues--many of them products of the Heifetz-Piatigorsky era at USC--decided to bring a little night music to the white nights of the Alexander Archipelago.

Last May, another illustrious violinist, Yukiko Kamei, decided to spread the Alaskan gospel to Los Angeles. The emphatically successful result was the first and last Sitka/L.A. Festival.

Thursday night at the Japan America Theatre, Kamei and friends inaugurated the Chamber Music/L.A. Festival. Same festival. New name.

What’s in the name? A more cosmopolitan image, perhaps.

Ultimately, the geographic label must remain a trivial consideration. The important thing on this happy occasion was the music, which was good, and the music-making, which was glorious.

The evening opened with the charming chirps, touching twitters and orderly delirium--everything is relative--of Haydn’s C-major String Quartet, Opus 33, No. 3, a. k. a. “The Birds.� It was dispatched with exceptional style and sensitivity by Rosenthal and Kamei, Milton Thomas (viola) and Jeffrey Solow (cello).

Not incidentally, it also was dispatched with equal parts precision and passion. The virtuosic quasi-Alaskan Angelenos are not a timid bunch.

Sarah Walker, the British mezzo-soprano, brought special refinement to Brahms’ “Gestillte Sehnsucht� and “Geistliches Wiegenlied,� her tone warm and even, her articulation intense yet restrained. Thomas’ mellow viola sang just as expressively. Doris Stevenson sustained and reinforced the rhapsodic tone at the piano.

For telling contrast, Walker turned to Respighi’s “Il Tramonto,� a strangely affecting fusion of verismo lyricism, melancholy introspection and chamber-music transparency that almost makes one forgive and forget “The Pines of Rome.�

She sang with dark, opulent tone that turned luminous at the top. She shaded the text, Italianized Shelley, with subtle nuances and found suave allies in a string quartet that enlisted Koichiro Harada of Tokyo, Rosenthal, Marcus Thompson (viola) and Solow.

After intermission came the bilious modulations, the endless thematic meanderings and the shamelessly overwrought emotions of Cesar Franck’s F-Minor Piano Quintet. This period piece doesn’t do much for the cause of good taste and delicacy, but it does run its gnarled and bathetic course with heroic elan.

It was performed on this occasion with heroic elan by Kamei, Harada, Thompson and Peter Rejto (cello). Stevenson again was the marvelously propulsive pianist.

In their Sitka hall, the musicians play in front of a huge window. One can listen to concerts like this while gazing at the snowy peaks of Mount Edgecumbe in the distance as boats crisscross the harbor and gulls--maybe even an eagle or two--streak the sky.

The ambiance at the Japan America Theatre may seem a bit prosaic by comparison. But the mood is intimate, the sound is extraordinarily resonant and the performances are splendid. The priorities are in order.