MUSIC REVIEW : Mainly Mozart Festival Relaxes Its Pace a Bit

After opening with a pair of dynamite concerts, David Atherton’s 1992 Mainly Mozart Festival settled into a more relaxed mode Thursday night.

Instead of flashy, heart-pounding virtuoso concertos from Beethoven and Mendelssohn, the Spreckels Theatre audience was treated to Mozart’s rococo Flute Concerto No. 1 in G Major, K. 313, and Telemann’s demure Viola Concerto in G Major. With the exception of Cynthia Phelps’ stylish viola solo in the Telemann, the evening’s music-making cooled down to a level of thoughtful respectability.

Neither concerto is a brilliant showpiece, although Mozart’s Flute Concerto is awash in crabbed ornamentation.

Flutist Timothy Day took a fussy, myopic approach to his solo assignment, busily crafting each note instead of making sense of phrases and larger sections. Combined with his smallish, monochromatic sound, Day’s execution made the work sound more like an etude than a concerto, and its length seemed to take on Brucknerian proportions.

Fortunately, Phelps knew better than to preen over her Baroque bauble. She let her phrases gently unfold in the slow movements and spring to life according to the natural propulsion of each line in the faster movements. The warmth and purity of her unforced sound, especially in the plangent lowest register, raised an everyday concerto to festival status.

Music director Atherton and his 25-piece orchestra filled the rest of the program with small-scaled Mozart offerings and William Boyce’s tastefully retrograde Overture No. 10 in F Major.

The Overture is actually a breezy three-movement sinfonia. The spirited horn obbligatos in the outer movements and its serene middle movement, actually a graceful minuet, made it memorable. Published in 1770, Boyce’s Overture is a throwback to the orderly conventions of Handel’s time, as patently nostalgic as, say, Samuel Barber’s grand operas sounded in the post-serialist 1960s. Atherton and crew took Boyce too literally, though, because each repeated section calls for more than mere dynamic contrast.

Mozart’s March in D Major, K. 445, proved surprisingly dignified and graceful, while the Four Contradances, K. 267, were plain-spoken to a fault. Atherton pumped up Symphony No. 17 in G Major, K. 129, a teen-age Mozart opus covered with J. C. Bach’s fingerprints, to close the concert with a manic flourish.