MUSIC REVIEWS : Brass Melds Fun and Skill in a Gem of a Show : Donning white jogging shoes and armed with plenty of antics, the Canadian quintet also brings attentive musicianship to its work.

In its performance at the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Sunday night, the Canadian Brass avoided many extremes. There was nothing too slow, nothing too dissonant, nothing too intellectual, nothing too new and nothing too esoteric. Yet, given the limited palette the concert accommodated, the musicians offered lots of fun, and plenty of ability.

The five instrumentalists--trumpeters Frederic Mills and Ronald Romm, hornist David Ohanian, trombonist Eugene Watts and tubist Charles Daellenbach--entered from the rear of the hall, spiffily tail-coated--and arrayed in matching white jogging shoes, complete with red racing stripes. They accompanied their entrance with a boisterous, New Orleans jazz-style arrangement by Don Gillis of “Closer Walk,” and closed the evening by mincing their way through two similar encores, both arranged by Luther Henderson--”Tuba Tiger Rag” and “Saint’s Hallelujah.”

Throughout the concert, presented by the Orange County Philharmonic Society, musical aspects coexisted with staging. Beneath the jester’s hat in Henderson’s adaptation of highlights from Verdi’s “Rigoletto,” beyond the humorous introductory comments and besides the silly antics that went along with many of the selections, the Brass brought attentive musicianship to its work. The five matched one another in virtuosic feats and, when called upon, switched gears to attend to more refined repertory.

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In the hands of the quintet minus Daellenbach, Giovanni Gabrieli’s antiphonal Canzona No. 1, “La Spiritata” emerged pristine and graceful (written to take advantage of the two choir lofts in St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice, it was played from positions on either side of the stage and hall). Ives’ Variations on “America” received a bright, consistently crisp reading, despite mock-puzzled head-shaking over the most dissonant variation.

Most of the concert featured arrangements that were not always successful. As adapted by Fen Watkin, the Overture to Mozart’s “Zauberflote” translated to brass surprisingly well, but Arthur Frackenpohl’s version of “Summer,” from “The Four Seasons,” by Vivaldi could not convert the idiomatic string writing of the original into convincing brass parts, no matter how accomplished the five protagonists proved themselves. Chris Dedrick transformed three popular, charming pieces from the “Anna Magdalena Bach Notebook” (identified in erroneous order in the program) into slick film music.