MUSIC REVIEW : Sinfonica Nacional at UCLA Series

There were good intentions and high spirits aplenty in Royce Hall Wednesday evening, when the Orquesta Sinfonica Nacional appeared as the second event in the sixth UCLA Mexican Arts Series.

A pity then, that the music-making should be so coarse, and the program problematic.

In past years, UCLA has created an ad-hoc Mexican Arts Chamber Symphony for Abraham Chavez, conductor of the El Paso Symphony and a Mexican Arts Series regular. This year he had Mexico’s National Symphony, which plays later in Palm Springs under its music director, Francisco Savin, and has just recorded at UCLA two albums of concertos by Mexican composers Blas Galindo, Rodolfo Halffter and Manuel Ponce.

The kind of intense, self-critical listening usually honed in recording sessions was not apparent in the concert, however. Persistent misintonation undermined a solid string sound and palpable enthusiasm. No section was immune to the disease, but it proved most virulent in the woodwinds.

Perhaps as a result of that recording project, the program centered on concertos by Ponce. The “Concierto del Sur” remains a fresh, stimulating work, popular in the best sense. Guitarist Alfonso Moreno, unamplified, projected much of the insinuating rhythmic vitality heavily, sacrificing lyrical liquidity to the need to force out sound. His playing proved most sensitive and supple in the big first-movement cadenza.

Ponce’s Piano Concerto has never had the sort of patronage that the “Concierto del Sur” received from Segovia, and it was not hard to hear why, despite a taut, nobly drawn performance by Santiago Rodriguez. Though clearly shaped, the work recycles the vehement emotional expression of Rachmaninoff through a sequence of deja entendu cliches.

Chavez kept the accompaniments generally supportive and abreast of the soloists. Concertos, though, are not the ideal vehicles for either orchestral display or conductorial imagination.

“Sensemaya” by Silvestre Revueltas and a Suite of popular Mexican waltzes arranged by Manuel Enriquez also offered few interpretive challenges. Both stimulated a type of cautious verve from Chavez and his cohorts, the broadly indulgent waltzes suffering more from the chronic intonation lapses than the driving, astringent “Sensemaya.”

There was nothing cautious about the encore, however--Galindo’s rowdy “Sones de Mariachi.”