MUSIC REVIEW : A Melodic New Concerto

The San Diego Symphony’s premiere of Tyzen Hsiao’s 1988 Violin Concerto at Copley Symphony Hall unveiled the kind of contemporary music that warms the hearts of nervous orchestra managers. Hsiao’s accessible, tonal, melody-strewn concerto is unlikely to inspire complaining letters from traditionally minded subscribers. But the Taiwanese composer stayed so cautiously within the harmonic and structural outlines of the standard Romantic concerto that he excluded any sense of adventure associated with hearing a new work.

In the spirit of late-blooming nationalism, Hsiao infused his three-movement concerto with Taiwanese folk tunes and wistful melodies inspired by the same. But the composer’s own identity proved elusive, and he seemed to run out of steam in the final movement, a poorly constructed rondo that ran in every direction at once. Even a charitable listener could not fend off the concerto’s associations with a generic 1930s American movie score.

Violinist Cho-Liang Lin on Friday night gave the work as sympathetic and refined a performance as the composer, who was present, might expect to hear. In the haunting folk melodies that give the concerto its distinct, nationalistic flavor, Lin, who is also a native of Taiwan, produced his wonted shimmering tone and voluptuously shaped phrases. He dispatched the more complex figuration and showy cadenzas with fleet assurance.

Despite the rather dense scoring, guest conductor Heiichiro Ohyama kept soloist and orchestra together. The players, exhibiting less conviction for the concerto than the soloist, tended to lag behind the beat.

After intermission, Ohyama returned to lead the orchestra through a stirring, marvelously paced performance of Dvorak’s Symphony No. 8 in G Major. The orchestra has rarely sounded warmer or more uniformly buoyant. Ohyama the violist is a superb chamber music player, as local audiences know from his years of performing at the La Jolla SummerFest. On the podium Friday night, he elicited from the symphony members--especially the lower strings--the inviting intimacy that characterizes the best chamber music. Yet for all of his attention to detail, Ohyama scrupulously maintained the symphony’s underlying drive, building to brilliant climaxes that never blustered. Although his tempos tended to the conservative side, they never flagged.

The program opened with an unusually ingratiating reading of Brahms’ Academic Festival Overture. Ohyama wisely stressed the familiar work’s gentler, more lyrical side.