MUSIC REVIEWS : ST. PAUL CHAMBER ORCHESTRA AT UCLA

Touring without its outgoing music director, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra reached Westwood on Saturday night, bringing a fascinating podium guest, a splendid violin soloist and a standard but pleasing program.

Sir Alexander Gibson, for 25 years music director of the Scottish National Orchestra, is guest conductor for the Minnesota ensemble’s current national tour. In Royce Hall, UCLA, Saturday, he led Bach’s Third Suite, the C-major Violin Concerto of Haydn (with Cho-Liang Lin the soloist), Mozart’s Symphony No. 29 and the Suite from Stravinsky’s “Pulcinella”--yes, the same work heard in two other versions earlier in the week at the Music Center.

Gibson’s detailed and fussy conducting style seemed to elicit more careful and alert playing from the 34-member St. Paul group than it displayed at its last visit here in 1983, under Pinchas Zukerman’s looser control.

Now, however, the ensemble tends to sound brittle rather than bland, constrained rather than relaxed. Its wind players remain first-rate (if not always disciplined), and its string choir produces a more cohesive tone-quality than the one remembered from that 1983 appearance.

After pushy, overweighted and often over-loud readings of the Bach and Haydn works--Lin’s radiant and immaculate playing was seldom matched in the orchestra’s humorless accompaniment--the ensemble produced a handsome, solid account of Mozart’s 29th Symphony, though one usually lacking in sunniness, optimism and joy. After that, a decidedly mixed run-through of the “Pulcinella” suite became anticlimactic.