Bravo, too, for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra's concert last week at Royce Hall. Jeffrey Kahane came up with a couple of small-scale 1940s rarities very much worth attention: Samuel Barber's prickly Capricorn Concerto - Stravinsky stirred into Bach - and Richard Strauss' world-weary but pretty Duet-Concertino, one of his sunset works. A parade of orchestra members served as the exceptionally fluent soloists: oboist Allan Vogel, flutist David Shostac and trumpeter David Washburn in the Barber, clarinetist Gary Gray and bassoonist Kenneth Munday in the Strauss, reminders that LACO - as a whole or in its parts - is one of our most valued resources.

At the end there was Ivan Moravec as soloist in Mozart's D-minor Piano Concerto, wonderfully in tune with the work's astounding quotient of anger and dark passion, and locked as well into Kahane's own enlightened view of the work. Over the years I have recoiled at the hype Moravec's record company, Connoisseur Society, poured over his career; yet, for the duration of that Mozart concerto last Friday, he very well could have been, as the ads once proclaimed, the world's greatest pianist.