MUSIC REVIEWS : Master Chorale Performs Mozart : William Hall and company offer familiar material with a dull delivery, turning masterworks into routine.

More Mozart doesn’t necessarily mean better Mozart. There seem to have been precious few insightful or fresh performances of his music in Southern California this year, his year.

This turned out to be the case again Sunday night in the Orange County Performing Arts Center, when William Hall led the Master Chorale of Orange County in routine performances of music by Mozart, most of it triply familiar.

Hall devoted the first half of his concert to instrumental pieces. The Master Chorale Orchestra played exactly like what it is, a part-time ensemble of local free-lancers. Hall led them in sometimes-sloppy, low-voltage run-throughs of the “Zauberflote” Overture and “Eine kleine Nachtmusik.” So far, so tedious.

Richard Todd then brightened things up a bit with a lively reading of the Horn Concerto, K. 495. He offered elegantly inflected singing lines and, when the music called for it, brashness and bravura. Hall and orchestra supported effortfully, at one point missing an entrance after a cadenza.

The Chorale finally made its appearance after intermission for a performance of the Requiem.Hall seemed more in his element here, leading the choir in powerful outbursts and incisive musical oratory. It was impressive heft. But there wasn’t much else.

Textures remained thick. The intricacies of the orchestral part went largely unexplored, even when the ensemble could be properly heard above the choir, which wasn’t often. Clear enunciation in the Chorale proved a sometime pursuit.

Hall’s soloists--soprano Karon Poston-Sullivan, mezzo-soprano Bernice Brightbill, tenor Jonathan Mack, bass Louis Lebherz--were an ill-matched group, solid enough individually but mostly satisfied with just belting out their lines. Not much subtlety here.

Hall whipped up many a tempo yet didn’t create much drive. His was a heavy-handed reading, happiest at fortissimo volumes with the choir’s well-balanced power and punch, indifferent elsewhere.