Music : USC Symphony Salutes Copland

The USC Symphony Orchestra and its conductor, Daniel Lewis, presented a lesson in the art of communication in the course of their Friday concert at Bovard Auditorium, the second event in the USC School of Music’s continuing “Celebrating Copland” festival underwritten by the E. Nakamichi Foundation.

The Copland portion of the program was devoted to a thunderous reading of his Third Symphony, the remainder to a no-less-rewarding celebration of Dvorak, specifically his Seventh Symphony.

So, while our most glamorous local presenters continue to bypass Dvorak and fail to acknowledge the 90th birthday of our most important living composer, enterprising upstarts fill the gap, gaining audience favor for themselves no less than for the two composers (a recent Long Beach Symphony program similarly combined Copland and Dvorak most effectively).

Lewis and his charges downplayed the Brahmsian moonlight and melancholy of the Dvorak Seventh. Theirs was, rather, a bold, thrusting interpretation, charged with rhythmic energy yet able to croon when the occasion demanded, as in the sweetly languishing slow movement.

While this was a handsome ensemble performance, particularly in the lilting scherzo, it would be criminal not to single out for praise the liquid flute, oboe and clarinet solos.

The Copland was a knockout: tremendous in spirit and volume, with as stirring, bone-rattlingly exultant a statement of the last-movement fanfare as these ears have experienced.