MUSIC AND DANCE REVIEWS : GLENDALE ORCHESTRA

The Glendale Chamber Orchestra offered a pleasing sampling of standard repertory plus an intriguing bit of mixed media at its season finale, Saturday at Glendale High School. The event also revealed the compositional bent of music director Christopher Fazzi.

Three short Fazzi pieces--all premieres--occupied the second half of the program, revealing the conductor/composer to be a competent craftsman more sympathetic toward sonorities commonly heard in classic film scores.

Appropriately, the concert ended with the premiere of a film: Vittorio Rambaldi’s lovingly photographed “Prisma,” for which Fazzi (and his orchestra) had provided the sound track. The 10-minute vignette is a symbol-heavy downer in which a lonely mime woos a doll and then trades places with her so that she might live. Touching, if a bit maudlin--with music to match.

Fazzi’s Sarabande and Toccata flirted only sporadically with modernist harmonies and rhythms in its four minutes, preferring to luxuriate in late Romantic tone colors. An untaxed orchestra provided exemplary playing.

The more familiar fare gave this excellent ensemble better opportunity to show its mettle. In Respighi’s “The Birds,” Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 and Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” overture, the musicians proved fully up to the brisk tempos set by Fazzi. The Beethoven was a study in fast-faster-fastest that, in lesser hands, might have come unglued.

But thanks to an abundance of fine first-desk players and consistently strong strings, the orchestra handled the virtuosic passages with flair. And, to his credit, Fazzi kept a tight grip on the reins throughout.