LADERMAN, POULENC CONCERTOS : CHAMBER GROUP AT GINDI

Strong programming, scrappy performances--the survival of American Chamber Symphony seems a matter of trade-offs.

For the latest installment in the continuing saga of Nelson Nirenberg’s little instrumental band, performing again this season in Gindi Auditorium at the University of Judaism, music director Nirenberg arranged a balanced program of works by Brahms, Ezra Laderman and Francis Poulenc, then conducted them with mixed results.

The acoustical blessings of Gindi Auditorium, it would seem, also expose. Tuesday night, they revealed Nirenberg’s wind-players as virtuosic, rich in tone--and overaggressive in dynamics.

In Brahms’ Serenade in A, Opus 16, they swamped their stringed colleagues, curdling the creamy Brahmsian textures most cruelly. They proved similarly pushy in Ezra Laderman’s Violin Concerto, overplaying to the point of covering their fellows. In Poulenc’s “Aubade,” they behaved with somewhat greater gentility. But by that time, a number of sensitive listeners had fled the bright hall.

For the West Coast premiere performance of Laderman’s 25-year-old Violin Concerto, the composer was present to hear soloist Mischa Lefkowitz soar through its lyric passages and scale its myriad technical hurdles smoothly. Though undoubtedly a showpiece, the work is not easy for the listener. As Laderman pointed out in a pre-concert talk, it is a piece clearly of the post-Bartokian and post-Schoenbergian era, and tough--often dissonant, frantic and unrelenting--on the ears.

Still, Lefkowitz, Nirenberg and the orchestra gave it a fair hearing, one timed, paced and articulated most carefully.

Eduardo Delgado was the soloist in a bracing reading of Poulenc’s “choreographic concerto” for piano and 18 instruments of 1929, giving equal weight to heroic, ironic and songful elements, flying over the keyboard with aplomb, and dropping chordal missiles with pinpoint accuracy. Closer contact between conductor and soloist might have improved the total musical thrust, but this apparently underrehearsed performance nevertheless achieved many charms.