MUSIC REVIEW : ORCHESTRA A BIT CAUTIOUS UNDER LEVY

The Orange County Chamber Orchestra under Micah Levy played with polish, transparency and unanimity of purpose at a concert Sunday afternoon at the Orange campus of Loyola Marymount University. Still, interpretations tended toward the cautious.

Levy built the program out of engaging, unhackneyed music by Haydn, Bruch and Britten. An Albinoni adagio-- the Adagio--was thrown in as the token potboiler. Levy let the music make its points, allowed phrases to breathe and larger structures to unfold with ease and proportion.

Still, the conductor’s apparent reluctance to impart a strong sense of personality to the music was not always an asset. Haydn’s Symphony No. 77, for example, emerged with a sense of grace, lightness and gallantry that slighted the composer’s wit and virile energy.

For its part, the string section had recurring problems with fraying pitch--not only here but throughout the concert--and insecurity when divided into parts.

Fewer problems were evident in playing Max Bruch’s Serenade, a series of dreamy miniatures accented occasionally by dark colors and marching rhythms.

Albinoni’s infamous Adagio (reconstructed out of virtually nothing by Italian musicologist Remo Giazotto) allowed the strings to indulge in some old-fashioned baroque ski-slope style phrasing and concertmaster Jacqueline Brand to voice sweet, poised solos and a wide, out-of-period vibrato.

The audience applauded Albinoni/Giazotto politely but gave its enthusiasm where it best belonged, to a strong performance of Britten’s Serenade for tenor, horn and strings.

Britten’s setting of English lyric poems expressing different feelings for the night was written for Peter Pears and Dennis Brain. Against such musical icons, Levy’s soloists--tenor Grayson Hirst and hornist Richard Todd--naturally came up short.

Yet Hirst responded to the varying rhetorical demands of the poems with lyric sweetness and negotiated the shift from prayer to curse in “This ae nighte” with appropriate power. Todd had recurring intonation problems but also played with strength, evenness and expressivity.

Auditorium lights were kept on during the performance so that the audience could follow the texts.