Music Reviews : YMF Debut Orchestra Plays With Vigor and Discipline

At the end of their first season together, music director Lara Webber and the Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra reveal a strong musical discipline, a ready execution and ever-intelligent thoughts on the music at hand.

In the orchestra’s 39th-season finale, Monday night at Ambassador Auditorium, the young players--the instrumentalists are 25 or younger and Webber looks to be similarly aged--displayed these talents in exposing music of Haydn and Sibelius.

The real star turn, however, came when one of their own, percussionist Janis Potter, stepped forward to solo in Ney Rosauro’s Marimba Concerto. Here is a player with an assured, silky virtuosity and a taste for showmanship: She seemed to relish the opportunity to bring us this music, dancing, darting and grinning her way through it.

Rosauro’s accessible work proved a perfect vehicle, smoothly driven by jazzy ostinatos and Brazilian dance rhythms in its outer movements, mellowing for its glimmering and bluesy slow Lament. Webber and ensemble gave neat support to Potter’s snazzy and exuberant, though always controlled and pointed, performance.

Haydn’s Symphony No. 83, “The Hen,” opened the concert in an attentive, tidy and rather too well-behaved reading. Its details and contrasts sounded in place, but seemed dictated by etiquette rather than by free expression.

*

The more overt drama of Sibelius’ Symphony No. 1 found the musicians apparently more comfortable. They projected its ruggedness with vigor, its pungent subtleties and sweeping lines with stylish flair.

Webber, while not entirely erasing the work’s discursive weaknesses, led a firmly propelled, attentively sculpted and carefully considered account.