MUSIC REVIEW : Solos Spark Less-Than-Super Sunday Concert

On Sunday afternoon, while many San Diegans were watching the Super Bowl, Zoltan Rozsnyai led his International Orchestra in a concert of Johann Strauss waltzes in the Lyceum Theatre. This feat was either a sign of the city’s expanding cosmopolitan pursuits or of an unusually benign sense of scheduling. With only a handful of people in the audience, the latter explanation is more likely.

Fortunately, Rozsnyai’s program was more than Viennese pastry. Several of the orchestra’s first chair players were featured in solo vehicles, including Tamas Velenczei in a Vivaldi Trumpet Concerto and Ping Hu in Debussy’s “Dances for Harp.”

Velenczei played the Vivaldi B-flat Trumpet Concerto as a star turn, pumping out fluent, high-decibel figurations from his tiny piccolo trumpet. If this Hungarian virtuoso modeled his playing after the intense, brilliant French school, he nevertheless found a sweet, unforced lyricism for the slow movement cantilena. Rozsnyai chose not to employ a harpsichord for the Vivaldi, considered by most a requirement of Baroque convention, but he did leave the podium in the middle movement to play the harpsichord part on an upright piano. The stylistically foreign timbre of the ill-tuned upright piano was a sonic disaster.

In the Debussy, Hu’s deft, incisive technique caught the composer’s Impressionistic flair without sacrificing either precision or clarity. Although the harp danced, the orchestra was not as fleet on its feet, lagging behind the pulse with unfortunate determination.

A pair of Hungarian Dances by Leo Weiner, a sentimental 20th-Century Hungarian composer who would have been happier living in the Vienna of Johann Strauss, were redeemed by the delectable solos of clarinetist Hu Tan, whose seamless, stylish phrasing was the program’s high point. Tan’s colorful clarinet timbre--reedy like an oboe, but clean and malleable throughout the range--is a welcome contrast to many contemporary American clarinetists, whose controlled, opaque sound ideal approaches the color of the transverse flute.

Aaron Copland’s five-movement “Music for Theatre” sounded under-rehearsed, tentative where it should have been reflective, labored where the composer called for a jazzy, humorous touch. The Johann Strauss potpourri, including chestnuts such as “Perpetuum Mobile,” the “Pizzicato Polka” and the “Emperor’s Waltz,” was long on brio but short on elegance.