MUSIC REVIEW : OCCO: An Unfocused Opener : The Orange County Chamber Orchestra began its 10th season with a hodgepodge program under director Micah Levy.

What can one reasonably expect from the part-time assemblage of musicians that is the Orange County Chamber Orchestra?

That is the question that one listener had to ask after the group’s disappointing 10th season opener Sunday afternoon at Irvine Barclay Theatre.

It is also a question that founder and music director Micah Levy might have profitably asked himself-- before the concert.

In choosing the hodgepodge program--music by Matthew Locke and Elliott Carter, Joaquin Rodrigo and Joseph Haydn--he not only failed to give the concert a strong musical focus, but he challenged his occasional orchestra with too many styles and ensemble configurations at once.

Not that his players lack expertise. Individually, they are solid musicians. But they do not play as an ensemble. Under Levy’s less-than-forceful leadership Sunday, there was little give and take, rhythmic agreement, blend or balance among them. The performances, with one exception, turned out to be not much more than organized run-throughs.

Locke’s incidental music to “The Tempest” (from 1674) emerged pleasant enough, but without the polish necessary for its sculpted dance rhythms to spring to life. Haydn’s Symphony No. 80 tramped along in an unsettled manner, especially in the rhythmic calisthenics of the finale.

Carter’s brief “Elegy” found Levy and orchestra in their best form of the day, in an intelligently shaped and well played reading, offered in memory of the OCCO’s late oboist Peter Scott.

Guitarist Jack Sanders, sitting in for an indisposed Eric Henderson, took on the solo duties in Rodrigo’s “Fantasia Para un Gentilhombre.” He gave a suitably relaxed, pliant and sensitively nuanced reading. Discreetly amplified, he was able to project an array of color. Levy, inexplicably with his back to the soloist, accompanied inflexibly.