MUSIC REVIEW : Youth Help Orchestra End Season : The Chamber Orchestra enlisted developing soloists to close a term in which low ticket sales meant cancellations.

Micah Levy, the music director of the Orange County Chamber Orchestra, closed his troubled season with a mostly Mozart program Monday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre where he enlisted youthful but only developing soloists.

Levy had canceled half the season in September because of low ticket sales and declining donations to his 9-year-old group. One suspects that the small ensemble he led on this occasion--13 players--was more the result of financial considerations than of any attempt to meet so-called authentic historical practice demands.

His orchestra was made up of six violins, one viola, one cello, one bass, two oboes and two horns. The strings often sounded underpowered, wiry and scratchy, and ensemble slurred.

But Levy showed a real sense of the correct style, particularly when he led the Symphony No. 29. And if he threw more body English into his conducting than appeared warranted for such a small group, at least the players responded promptly and alertly to his efforts to energize and shape the music.

Susan Boettger, 19, a winner of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Spotlight Awards, was the somewhat nervous soloist in the Piano Concerto No. 9, K. 271.

Lyric in her approach, she played with a gradation of sensitive touch, but she didn’t allow herself much freedom in phrasing or find any depths in the music.

Still, although she was playing a concert grand, she managed to keep the sound intimate and properly proportioned to the accompanying ensemble. Her delicacy and poise in the Menuetto of the final movement made for perhaps her finest moments.

She had opened the program with a tensely driven account of the Etude-Tableau No. 5 from Rachmaninoff’s Opus 39.

Trained in the Suzuki method of playing by his father, Marden Abadi, a piano teacher in Irvine, Arthur Abadi, 7, was the soloist in the early pastiche Piano Concerto No. 3, K. 40.

The concerto is made up of movements that the 11-year-old Wolfgang (or more likely his father; the original score is in Leopold’s handwriting) expropriated from works by Leontzi Honauer, Johann Gottfried Eckard and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, respectively.

Utilizing a special blocked apparatus that allowed his short legs to manipulate the foot pedals, the 7-year-old demonstrated dexterity, speed, strength and musicality that undoubtedly went far beyond what one has the right to expect from a youth of that age.

As an encore, he played a boogie-woogie version of “The Flight of the Bumble-Bee.”