CLASSICAL MUSIC REVIEW : Previn Sparkles at SummerFest : Concert: The guest conductor coaxes a lithe and graceful sound from the orchestra on one of Mozart’s most inspired works.

Given David Atherton’s annual Mozart festival and the many Mozart performances regularly scheduled by local orchestras, no one is likely to conclude that San Diego suffers from a Mozart shortage. Nevertheless, Mozart played with the chemistry and excitement of Sunday evening’s SummerFest ’90 chamber orchestra concert is a rare commodity anywhere.

Oddly, this all-Mozart concert began inauspiciously with a lackluster reading of the F Major Divertimento, K. 138. On the podium, festival artistic director Heiichiro Ohyama demanded an unrelenting, industrial-strength performance from an ensemble of 20 strings selected from the San Diego Symphony. But, when Ohyama handed the baton to guest conductor Andre Previn and picked up his viola to join violinist Young Uck Kim in the E-flat Major Sinfonia Concertante, K. 364, it was, as they say, a whole new ballgame.

Previn’s light touch coaxed a lithe, graceful response from the orchestra, appropriately augmented with winds, as the two soloists probed the spiritual depths of one of Mozart’s most inspired works. In agility and strongly shaped phrasing, Kim and Ohyama were ideally matched, and Ohyama’s throaty timbre richly complemented Kim’s supple, burnished sound. In the solo alternations of the Sinfonia’s beginning, each player kept an appropriately individual sound. But as their parts merged, they blended with incandescent fusion. Symphony horns John Lorge and Warren Gref earned kudos for their precise, sweetly tuned counterpoint to the orchestra’s stylish performance.

If the Sinfonia Concertante is a lofty philosophical treatise, Mozart’s E-flat Concerto for Two Pianos is an amiable conversation between friends over coffee. From lesser soloists, the rococo piano parts prattle inanely, but SummerFest pianists David Golub and Andre-Michel Schub demonstrated the eloquent wit of Congreve’s Restoration comedians. Their lively articulations sparkled, playing off one another with knowing but ever tasteful nuance and clever ornamentation. Ohyama kept the orchestra in the background, although Previn’s finesse would have been the ultimate complement.

For the all-Mozart program, SummerFest sought out the more commodious surroundings of UC San Diego’s Mandeville Auditorium, although the 562 in attendance (the hall seats 788) almost could have fit in Sherwood Auditorium, the festival’s usual venue.

Earlier Sunday afternoon at Mandeville Auditorium, a group of SummerFest’s “rising stars,” young professional musicians-in-residence, displayed their emerging talents in a chamber concert. Notable was a highly charged yet luminous performance of Schubert’s D Minor String Quartet “Death and the Maiden.”

First violinist Sheryl Staples brought a refined, nimble technique and shimmering timbre to the work’s ample demands. The 21-year-old musician from Los Angeles played with immense promise. As the ensemble’s coach and second violinist, Julie Rosenfeld of the Colorado String Quartet achieved an admirable balance and unity with her talented young musicians. Violist Yun Jie Liu and cellist Holly Reeves completed the quartet.

Pianist Golub bore most of the responsibility for breathing life into the Franck F Minor Piano Quintet. Golub’s authoritative playing supplied the breadth and gravity this dramatic, heart-on-the-sleeve opus demands. The four string players, violinists Laura and Jennifer Frautschi, violist En-Sik Choi and cellist Wilhelmina Smith, played all the notes, but Franck’s effulgent emotional subtext escaped them.

Kenneth Bookstein and Max Levinson gave Schubert’s Fantasia in F Minor for piano four hands a clean, earnest reading, although they failed to make the conventional piece convincing as a concert vehicle.