MUSIC REVIEWS : Santa Monica Symphony: Brisk Energy

The Santa Monica Symphony may not be a model of precision music-making, but a veteran listener could find much to admire and enjoy in the second concert of its 49th season at Santa Monica Civic Auditorium Sunday night.

Music director Allen Robert Gross, now in his fourth season, lead briskly and breezily. He got his players, a mixture of college, community and, in the solo positions, professional musicians, to play with wonderful spirit and freedom: This orchestra did not play tentatively, even in such difficult music as Richard Strauss’ “Don Juan,” which opened the concert.

The Civic Auditorium acoustics, with its clear highs and resonant lows, proved friendly to the orchestra. In this atmosphere, Beethoven’s First Symphony romped joyously, its instrumental detail frank and characterful, its accents emphatic and springy. Despite some moments of ensemble raggedness, there was never a hint of effortfulness in the playing. In all its essentials, the music bloomed.

Seventeen-year-old flutist Gregory Lawrence Jefferson was the lively, confident soloist in Mozart’s Flute Concerto No. 2, K. 314. With a finely focused tone, compact vibrato, firm finger work and pointed articulation, Jefferson jumped all technical hurdles with abandon.

His musical inflection was straightforward but far from mechanical. He projected the direction of a line, knows and communicates its hills and curves.

At the end of the program, conductor and orchestra rollicked and tip-toed through Johann Strauss Jr.’s “Roses From the South” Waltz.