GILAD LEADS ENSEMBLE : STRAWBERRY CREEK FEST ENDS

Since the much-lamented demise of the Claremont Music Festival in the mid-1970s, Southern California has been patiently awaiting the next, thinking-person’s indoor summer series. The Strawberry Creek Festival, which concluded its second season at Pepperdine University, Malibu, over the weekend, may be it.

Like Giora Bernstein, who led the Claremont series before he moved to Colorado and started another summer festival, Yehuda Gilad seems to be a young conductor with strong programming ideas and an attractive podium manner who has surrounded himself with bright and gifted soloists to serve as his orchestral principals. Saturday, those individuals and the chamber-size ensemble built around them shone in a Stravinsky-Chopin-Mendelssohn agenda.

Given that this is an ensemble of teachers and students, one had to be impressed with its cohesiveness of sound and instrumental textures.

In Stravinsky’s “Pulcinella” Suite and Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony, Gilad presided over lively and clear-headed readings--sometimes over-loud and over-exuberant, to be sure, but well-limned nonetheless. Among the 12 principals taking bows after the suite were violinist Kathleen Lenski, cellist David Speltz, bassist Susan Morganthaler, bassoonist Kenneth Munday, flutist Gary Woodward and oboist Gerard Reuter, all of whom had earned those bows.

The veteran American pianist, Abbey Simon, made an all too rare Southern California appearance at mid-program in Chopin’s F-minor Concerto, which he played with a ravishing songfulness and minutely sculptured details.

This was an aristocratic reading, one handsomely tended, deeply probing and perfectly articulate; it provided the sweep of Chopin’s vision and the sweetness of his subtleties. Only Simon’s unfortunate habit of humming under his breath--but with remarkable projection--got in the way of one’s complete musical satisfaction. That and the orchestra’s often-exposed penchant for playing above the called-for dynamic level.