MUSIC REVIEW : Accessible, Tonal Essay Fails to Soar : Symphony: After the lackluster Lees concerto and flutist Rampal’s crowd-pleasing performance, Talmi leads the orchestra in a rich rendering of a Schumann work.

Now that accessible contemporary music is politically correct, Benjamin Lees’ stock should be soaring.

Under music director Yoav Talmi, the San Diego Symphony opened its Friday night program at Copley Symphony Hall with the American composer’s Concerto for Brass Choir and Strings, written in 1983 for the Dallas Symphony. But just because music is neither painfully dissonant nor bewilderingly abstract does not automatically make it rewarding.

Like a well-tuned helicopter, Lees’ concerto rose from its pad, hovered gracefully, and landed again. The dark, unswervingly tonal essay for brass, percussion and strings was intricately constructed--it just didn’t go anywhere. Based on terse, repeated rhythmic motifs, Lees’ idiom suggested at times Prokofiev or Shostakovich, not to mention any number of American neoclassicists who took their cue from Stravinsky. From this concerto and Lees’ Passacaglia, which the orchestra played some ten years ago, Lees’ own voice comes across as a very muted shade of gray. After Talmi and the orchestra gave the work a solid, sober reading, the composer came to the stage to receive warm applause from the audience.

Guest flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal dutifully displayed the modest charms of the G Major Flute Concerto by Carl Stamitz, a minor contemporary of Mozart. Although the predictable rococo concerto did not tax the famed Frenchman’s technical prowess, he bathed its cheerful themes in his wonted rich, breathy timbre. Talmi appropriately cropped the orchestra to respectable 18th-Century proportions and delivered a neatly tailored accompaniment.

Rampal was able to indulge his effortless, limpid phrasing to greater effect in Gabriel Faure’s Fantasie for Flute and Orchestra, a programmed encore that followed the Stamitz concerto.

Following Rampal’s crowd-pleasers, Talmi and the orchestra settled in for a highly satisfying traversal of Schumann’s First (“Spring”) Symphony. Seldom has the orchestra sounded as rich and its individual choirs as evenly balanced. Talmi conducted the Schumann without a score, a sure sign that he is partial to the piece. His bright tempo for the opening Allegro insured an effervescent pulse, which he complemented with dreamy melodic lines in the slower sections, and the trios of the Scherzo had a welcome lighthearted quality. Talmi captured the composer’s optimism and heady romanticism with undeniable conviction.