MUSIC REVIEW : A Muffled Sound of Music at the Celebrity : Inhospitable acoustics make it a trying evening for Orange County Symphony, audience.

ANAHEIM — Listening to the Orange County Symphony play Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique” is a little like watching your 11-year-old attempt a double axel. You’re real happy if the effort doesn’t end in catastrophe, but you know that the kid is not a contender.

Of course, the orchestra, led by Philippe Bender in a program Friday that also included works of Debussy and Mozart, did have to contend with the inhospitable acoustics of the Celebrity Theatre. Usually a setting for amplified pop music acts, the cushy Celebrity absorbs natural sound like a blotter, even if, as on this occasion, half the seats of the theater-in-the-round are blocked off and the orchestra plays in front of a reflective shell.

Thus, the delicate scoring of Debussy’s “Prelude a l’Apres-midi d’un Faune” evaporated in the hall, and the piece took on the airy character of Webern or a pointillistic exercise. Similarly, the harps of the Ballroom scene of the Berlioz symphony could barely be heard, at least not from a seat midway back on an aisle on the conductor’s right.

But faulty acoustics couldn’t be blamed for Bender’s actually having to clap out the beat at one point to keep the orchestra together, or for the crude, breathy intoning of the Dies Irae by the brass, the thin string tone, or the cobblestone textures in which secondary material frequently became more prominent than main themes.

Imagine, for instance, foregrounding the oompah underpinning of the brass fanfares in the March to the Scaffold.

The best moments came in the opening dialogue between English horn (played by Jane Green) and oboe (John Ralston), and the final thunderous passages, all in the countryside scene.

Director of the Orchestre Regional de Cannes, France, Bender certainly knows the correct Gallic style, and he worked hard to energize the orchestra. Mercifully, he did not take any of the repeats.

Although somewhat boxed in by Bender’s vigorous and spirited approach, Eugenia Zukerman proved a fluent soloist in Mozart’s Flute Concerto No. 2.

Bender previously led the orchestra in 1980, when it was known as the Garden Grove Symphony. It has been subsequently renamed in an effort to attract an audience from a wider geographical base.

Friday’s event was the first of the orchestra’s subscription programs to be held outside of its home at the Don Wash Auditorium in Garden Grove. It was partly sponsored by the Leo Freedman Foundation, which owns the Celebrity, and the city of Anaheim.