MUSIC REVIEW : Youth Group at Ford Amphitheatre

For one who grew up musically in the New York of the 1960s, the Monday night concert at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre tugged at the memory: a stage packed with as many young instrumentalists as it could hold, with Alexander Schneider--conductor, violinist, educator, inspiration to youth--leading his charges, in this case a sizable Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute Chamber Orchestra, through monuments of 18th-Century repertory.

The outdoor setting would not have reminded anyone of Carnegie Hall or the New School for Social Research, where such events took--perhaps still take--place, but the sounds were familiar: big, brash, energetic, not always in perfect mechanical order, but never casual or unmotivated.

Schneider, now 82, will have none of your newfangled, scholarly, rehearsal time-consuming notions about old music. Get on with it, he would seem to be saying, don’t be namby-pamby, play the right notes and when you feel like singing, open wide.

It didn’t always work, but it was never dull. The festive first of Handel’s Opus 3 Concerti grossi was earthbound by a bass line composed of eight cellos and six double-basses. Unable to soar, it had to march, rather like a royal processional, which made its own kind of sense, if not necessarily Handel’s.

Mozart’s “Little” G-minor Symphony, K. 183, discharged the evening’s anger quotient in a reading of fierce drive, so thoroughly string-dominated in the tuttis that Mozart’s startling, dissonant use of a quartet of horns--which might be considered the point of the piece--went by the boards.

Haydn’s “Oxford” Symphony, however, was a joyous send-off. In the peaceful adagio opening, the upper strings provided the warm, cohesive sound absent earlier, and from that point Schneider launched his charges into a burly, rollicking interpretation that was not without some refined wind-string interchanges and, as ever with the beloved Sascha on the podium, energy to burn--and to cherish.