MUSIC REVIEW : S.D. CHAMBER MUSIC TAKES BANAL TONE

Certain radio stations have staked out their share of the market by playing innocuous, mellifluous music aptly called “easy listening.” Sunday night at the Lyceum Stage, San Diego Chamber Orchestra conductor Donald Barra brought this questionable genre into the concert hall.

Barra certainly demonstrated that contemporary music need not be abrasive or cacophonous, but it’s unfortunate that he chose to make a case for banal background music as the alternative.

Samuel Barber’s effusive Violin Concerto, featuring violinist Jaime Laredo, was as serious as Barra’s program got. He opened the concert with David Ward-Steinman’s “Winging It,” a work the San Diego State University resident composer finished only last year but one that sounded as dated as an Aaron Copland tone poem from the 1930s.

Brief and structured in the usual three contrasting movements, “Winging It” meted out simple motifs in sugar-coated orchestration. Counterpoint, modulation, development, extension and other compositional devices that might have given the work depth were conspicuously absent, an atypical complaint, for Ward-Steinman’s style is usually sophisticated, albeit eclectic. This was no minimalist tapestry--just meager invention.

Not many composers would base a piece titled “New York Profiles” on Gregorian chant, but in 1949 American composer Norman Dello Joio evidently thought such a premise made sense. Barra’s direction of the Dello Joio suite was thoughtful, and his 30-piece group played this tame academic exercise with conviction, laudable ensemble and a pleasant smattering of woodwind solos. The experience, however, was more like hearing a studio orchestra record a commercial than listening to an orchestra interpret a score.

Laredo brought a degree of passion to the stage with his lyrical and agile interpretation of the Barber concerto. The Bolivian-born violinist met the composer’s neo-Romantic idiom with Romantic fervor: long, arched phrases and a rich, pulsing vibrato. He traversed the technical challenges of the finale’s perpetuum mobile with evident ease. While the orchestra put up a good fight, such a small number of strings could hardly create the lush textures Barber’s score requires.

Inasmuch as American orchestras have usually treated contemporary American composers with at best a kind of benign neglect, it seems almost churlish to complain about Barra’s all-American programming. But the listener’s mind needs stimulation just as much as his ear wants to be tickled. Some middle ground between, say, the complete works of Eliott Carter and Barra’s penchant for easy-listening fare should not be too difficult to locate.

The concert will be repeated at 8 tonight at Fairbanks Ranch Country Club.