Music Reviews : Prague Symphony Plays Costa Mesa

Performances by visiting orchestras ought to be a treat for music lovers, a shot in the arm for local programming, a goad to resident ensembles. The performance by the touring Prague Symphony, playing here for the first time Friday night, didn’t exactly live up to that formula.

Under its current music director, Petr Altrichter, the orchestra from Czechoslovakia played neatly and respectably when it appeared in Segerstrom Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, under auspices of the Orange County Philharmonic Society.

But, in an unenterprising--and sadly predictable--program of works by Smetana, Saint-Saens and Dvorak, it regularly failed to excite.

Part of the reason is Altrichter’s usually blunt and coarse leadership. In “Wallenstein’s Camp,” he demonstrated no compelling reasons for reviving Smetana’s early opus. In Saint-Saens’ Second Piano Concerto and the “New World” Symphony, he found no interesting byways, certainly no new wrinkles, in their familiar profiles.

In the second half of this well-attended program, the Prague ensemble showed itself to be a most competent and accomplished, though neither distinctive nor remarkably virtuosic, orchestra.

The “New World” Symphony moved along mostly without untoward incident, but at dynamic levels usually not strongly modulated. When the irrepressible Largo arrived, for instance, one had to be grateful that the band was at last achieving genuinely soft playing, while noting with distress that the concert was already 90 minutes old at that point.

At the central point in the event, Elisso Bolkvadze, who made her local debut in a wonderful recital at Ambassador Auditorium in May, returned to play Saint-Saens’ G-minor Concerto.

For whatever reasons, the 24-year-old pianist from Soviet Georgia disappointed, in an incompletely realized, low-polish, pedestrian reading of a work most players find grateful. Its ardors, its charms, its Romantic ambience--all seemed foreign to Bolkvadze. She did play the notes, fast, loud and accurately, most of the time. Yet this performance seemed stamped, all over: Not from France.