MUSIC REVIEWS : SANTA MONICA ENSEMBLE IN 40TH YEAR

Things haven’t changed much in the two decades since this generation of critics began attending Santa Monica Symphony concerts.

Civic Auditorium, a barnlike hall with unflattering acoustics, still hosts the orchestra’s Sunday night events; radio personality Raoul Gripenwaldt remains the on-site, live program annotator; a loyal audience never seems to fill the auditorium yet makes up in enthusiasm what it lacks in sophistication (applause between movements is always to be expected).

And the ensemble, which seems to have undergone few personnel changes in the three years since Victor Bay, its third music director since its founding in 1945, retired, remains a model of competence in the community-orchestra marketplace.

Yehuda Gilad, a young conductor from Israel, has led the orchestra since 1982; Sunday night, he began his fourth season by celebrating the ensemble’s 40th birthday with a program of music by Charles Ives, Samuel Barber and Johannes Brahms.

Judging from the results, Brahms’ Second Symphony had received the least detailed preparation. Gilad conducted carefully, sacrificing line for beat, and failed to draw out those characterful inner voices. Pleasant soloism aside, the ensemble played scrappily throughout the length of the work.

Gilad & Co. proved more successful in dealing with the complexities in Ives’ “Decoration Day” and Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915.” If Ives’ multilayered score emerged smoothed-out instead of in sharp relief, at least its component parts were clarified.

And Gilad’s pacing of “Knoxville” found much of the poignancy, as well as most of the thrust, in Barber’s beloved paean to an American childhood. In this, he assisted the soloist, soprano Juliana Gondek--radiant of sound, clear of word, and touching in her integration of both--most stylishly.