MUSIC REVIEW : DEBUT ORCHESTRA OPENS MEDAL SERIES

Since its founding, 30 years ago, the Debut Orchestra of Young Musicians Foundation has undergone trials, tribulations and endless growing pains. It has been a large orchestra and a chamber orchestra. It has surveyed many parts of the standard and non-standard repertory. It has survived the individualities of a number of music directors and principal conductors.

And it goes on. Monday night, opening the Gold Medal series at Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena, the Debut Orchestra showed aspects of its latest musical profile.

As for conductors, the YMF orchestra in 1984-85 seems to enjoy an embarrassment of riches. Current music director Lalo Schifrin leads the Debut ensemble some of the time. Guest conductors occupy whole concerts. And conductor-in-training Lucas Richman has been given some public podium duties.

At the first concert of the calendar year, the guest conductor was the Brazilian musician, Nelson Nirenberg, the 30-year-old founder of American Chamber Symphony. As he has a number of times with his own ensemble, Nirenberg displayed clear musical gifts, a reliable conducting technique and interesting interpretive ideas.

He took fresh approaches to Tchaikovsky’s familiar Fifth Symphony, emphasizing the lyrical content of the piece--and thereby heightening its climaxes. So well did this approach, and the many details Nirenberg utilized in its support, work, the tradition-encrusted Fifth seemed new again.

And the 77 young players of Debut played splendidly, with a zest and attentiveness that brought out the often-missing ebullience in this work. If, after a handsomely wrought first movement, their playing became less than immaculate, it still emerged caring and enthusiastic.

The remainder of this performance occupied a lower level of inspiration, but pleased nonetheless.

Daniel Shapiro, winner of the 1984 YMF competition in piano, was soloist in Beethoven’s G-major Concerto, and gave notice of extravagant musical gifts and admirable technical achievement. But his playing on Monday emerged unfocused in the overall conception of the mammoth work, nervous where it should have been reposeful, and only intermittently communicative. The 22-year-old pianist seems to have all the musical and digital equipment necessary to ascend this peak of the repertory; in time, he will no doubt surmount it.

Lucas Richman, who turns 21 later this month, occupied the podium at the beginning of the concert, leading a solid reading of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” Overture with aplomb and no small amount of authority. As it did later in Beethoven, the orchestra played scrappily.