COMMENTARY : Mainly Mozart Takes Turn to Miscellaneous : * Music: Weak programming by director David Atherton causes festival to fall short of goal to be San Diego’s classical event of the year.

Now that this year’s Kingston Mainly Mozart Festival is over, it seems appropriate to review its contribution to the local music scene. The 3-year-old festival not only competes with other local arts organizations for ever-diminishing private financial support, but it also receives funding from the San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture. For the 1991 fiscal year, Mainly Mozart received $26,209 from the Transient Occupancy Taxes allocated by the commission.

Mainly Mozart’s move indoors to the Spreckels Theatre from the Lowell Davis Festival Stage at the Old Globe was a significant acoustical improvement, and attendance at the new location downtown exceeded the festival’s own best-scenario projections. Music director David Atherton invited some of the stellar instrumental soloists from his two previous Mainly Mozart festivals, and their first-class artistry was reaffirmed.

But in sheer musical terms, what was advertised as the “classical music event of the year” fell significantly short of its own claim. Atherton’s programming concentrated on works of secondary importance, and the performance of his festival orchestra rarely rose above the level of professional efficiency.

Surprisingly, Atherton completely overlooked the heart of Mozart’s orchestral music. Not one of the 41 symphonies was played during the 10-day festival. And the two symphonies by other period composers that were performed, Leopold Mozart’s “Toy Symphony” and Schubert’s First Symphony, are decidedly minor works that should only be programmed in the company of, say, the late symphonies of Haydn and Mozart as a demonstration of the artistic gap between mere competence and mastery of a musical form.

Atherton concentrated on serenades and divertimenti, a total of five works in that category. Long-winded and repetitious, these compositions functioned as background music in the time of Mozart and Beethoven. Designed to fill up long stretches of time for royal dinners and other courtly social functions, this sort of music makes little lasting impression other than momentary diversion.

A number of musical novelties, e.g. pieces for glass armonica and a one-act semi-staged Mozart comic opera, would have garnished more serious programming. Instead, they contributed to the overall impression of a miscellaneously Mozart festival.

Besides the hyperbole of Mainly Mozart’s advertising, the claims made by festival officials insulted serious music-making in this city.

“If there is better music anywhere, I don’t know where it is,” festival board president Donald Worley told a Times reporter. In fact, an all-Mozart concert last month by the visiting Vienna Chamber Orchestra set a standard of Mozart performance that Mainly Mozart only approached. Under the baton of Philippe Entrement, the Viennese musicians achieved a warm, sensuous timbre and deftly unified execution quite beyond the pale of Atherton’s festival players. Under the direction of Andre Previn, the performance last August of Mozart’s “Sinfonia Concertante” by the La Jolla Chamber Music Society’s SummerFest orchestra gave a more refined and stylish account of the Mozart work than Atherton and company did last Sunday afternoon.

Comparing Mainly Mozart’s chamber music performances to those of any La Jolla SummerFest over the last five years puts Atherton’s efforts in second place every time. SummerFest soloists have consistently offered more polished, probing accounts of a far wider range of trios, quartets and quintets than Mainly Mozart has presented.

Mainly Mozart patrons who were seated in the Spreckels’ exclusive box seats were showered with fresh flowers upon arrival, served Champagne--which they imbibed during the concert--and served dessert by uniformed attendants during intermission. Such meticulous attention to these superficial aspects of the festival may have added to the event’s snob appeal, but more enlightened attention to the festival’s planning and rehearsing would bring the event closer to its own vaunted artistic goals.