Music Review : YMF Debut Orchestra Performs at Royce Hall

Appropriately enough, the Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra turned its leadership and part of its program over to young musicians, Sunday afternoon at Royce Hall.

Daniel Carl Hege, winner of the National Conducting Competition last spring, is definitely a figure to watch. He has a natural sense of poise and bearing on the podium, a precise beat, and a good perception of how to shape dynamic levels. He also had an interesting program to work with, centered upon the year 1944 with a side trip to 1989.

Hege took Stravinsky’s brief, playful “Petrushka” flashback, “Scherzo a la Russe,” at the composer’s tempo, gaining vibrancy and bounce with each repeat of the theme. He displayed a sure, fluid grip on the structure and contours of Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5. It was a sound, solid, often impressive performance, lacking only the extra edge of demonic urban tension that the piece can generate.

The 1989 entry of the afternoon was the work of Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, a young (born 1964) Mexican composer with a long resume whose “Gota de Noche” won a BMI Student Composer Award. Here, Sanchez-Gutierrez has fashioned a most alluring orchestral landscape in the manner of Alan Hovhaness, with exotic washes of percussion over a string haze and a moody, ruminating English horn (expertly played by Marilyn Schram) and mallet percussion as solo voices. The piece also has the virtue of brevity.