MUSIC REVIEW : Nationalistic Tint From Czech Group

Critics and listeners have lamented the disappearance of distinct national styles in orchestral playing, but they can still be heard from time to time.

Take, for instance, the Janacek Philharmonic from Ostrava (an industrial city of 350,000 in the Czech Republic), which performed Sunday at the Terrace Theater in Long Beach. There’s certainly no mistaking it for an American orchestra, or German, Russian or French, though its conductor, oddly, is an American, one Dennis Burkh.

The Janacek’s strings have a gentle, shiny, never hard-edged sound, as if strung with silk rather than steel. The woodwinds are mellow and reedy, and the brass pointed and poised, as if the players work in Czech swing bands on the side. The percussion--they call it the “battery”--plays brashly and with no apologies.

In music by Dvorak--the Slavonic Rhapsody No. 1, the Slavonic Dance No. 8, and the Symphony No. 8--the orchestra seemed never to force its sound, and Burkh led as if sweating was strictly forbidden. He elicited casual, charming and polite performances, apparently uninterested in digging deep (not that this is always profound music), satisfied with surface beauty.

But those surfaces could be something. Though the fortes were relatively unimpressive and meek, the pianos, resorted to often, were pure gold: genuinely soft, floating, warm. The orchestra executed tidily but not tightly--there’s a looseness to the ensemble, a comfortable, lived-in quality.

In the middle of all this pleasant Dvorak came a disaster. Pianist Dong-Jin Kim (the program provided just the name) murdered Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, or maybe it was the other way around. All manner of mistakes--wrong notes, dropped notes, dropped passages, muddles, improvisations--riddled his account. Burkh and the Janacek mostly kept up and the Community Concert Assn. crowd cheered as if nothing amiss had happened.