MUSIC REVIEW : Contest Winner Performs With Orchestra : Cellist Brent Samuel combines youthful flare with authority and precision in South Coast Symphony date.

Brent Samuel, the 20-year-old winner the South Coast Symphony’s first Young Artists Concerto Competition, offered an intelligent, gutsy interpretation of Haydn’s Concerto for Cello in C with the orchestra Sunday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

Samuel, a student of Eleonore Schoenfeld and a USC sophomore majoring in cello, combined youthful flare with authority and precision for an exciting performance that outshone his accompanists. The orchestra partnered capably, with amiable spirit but little concern for nuance.

Under the direction of John Larry Granger, similar obliviousness colored Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, which emerged with abundant furor and sparse refinement.

Only in the pizzicato Scherzo did strings clearly delineate voicing. Otherwise, decisions regarding balance seemed to have been sidestepped.

Nevertheless, winds, particularly woodwinds, acquitted themselves well. John Ralston’s lilting oboe solo established an Andante that was truly “in modo di canzona”--only to have the aura squelched by shapeless and directionless string passages. Lower brass growled effectively for the Finale.

However, horns disappointed with a series of prominent cracks, beginning with the opening fanfare.

The program began with Karl Kohn’s “Time Irretrievable in Three Movements,” a nod to composers of days gone by that reflects, according to the composer’s notes, “my nostalgia as I contemplate and pay tribute to what seems now, perhaps falsely, simpler worlds of previous time(s).”

The result is a hodgepodge of shifting sonorities and styles cemented by recurrent notes (the first movement) or rhythmic figures (the last).

There are enough interesting combinations to merit a second and third hearing, especially of the leisurely unfolding Lento.

Granger led his group in an ingenuous reading of the work, relentlessly good-natured even in a potentially threatening undercurrent that builds during the Allegro moderato.