MUSIC REVIEW : Pianist Keeps Orchestra on the Run : Soloist John Browning challenges the Orange County Symphony of Garden Grove with his fleet-fingered confidence and his mastery of expression.

John Browning gave the Orange County Symphony of Garden Grove a run for its money Saturday night at Don Wash Auditorium.

According to general manager Yaakov Dvir-Djerassi, Browning commands the largest fee ever offered by the board--$8,000--a sum that sent organizers racing for corporate sponsorship.

Pianist and orchestra collaborated in Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,” which requires lightning-quick repartee between solo and orchestral forces. Browning sent his partners scrambling to keep up, as he sailed through with fleet-fingered security. Often, he simply left them in the dust.

The soloist communicated an edge-of-the-seat excitement despite his self-effacing stage demeanor. Moreover, his mastery of dynamics and tone, and his unfailing ability to sustain an idea, packed expression into the Andante cantabile.

Music director Edward Peterson led his band in a scrappy attempt to back this artist. But the orchestra opened with a flaccid introduction. It occasionally missed cues and, by entering too loud to permit effective swells beneath quiet piano passages, threw away opportunities to pluck heartstrings.

On its own, the group fared better. Kodaly’s “Dances of Galanta,” a piece that totters between Eastern European Romanticism and schlocky melodrama, stayed in the first camp, thanks largely to a trim solo by clarinetist Nancy Peterson.

Though sometimes studied, sometimes ponderous, it later cleared for solos by first-chair woodwinds and built anxiously to a climax. The violin section, the weakest in the ensemble, faltered during entrances.

Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World,” also underscored troubles within the violin section, which is in the midst of a restructuring. Here, the violinists shaped phrases indifferently and descended to blandness at softer dynamic levels.

For the Allegro con fuoco, the orchestra wrapped a little spirit and a lot of bombast in rhythmic precision. Jon Ralston brought moving simplicity to the English horn solo.