Mehli Mehta Shows a Master’s Touch

The American Youth Symphony has been training orchestral hopefuls for 33 years under the well-tempered leadership of founder Mehli Mehta. Now 89, Mehta is in his last season at the active helm of his orchestra, which made its annual pilgrimage downtown Sunday evening for a gala benefit concert at the Music Center Pavilion.

The march to the podium has gotten slower for Mehta, but once safely there his ability to make music with passionate conviction remains undimmed. As usual, he worked completely from memory, leading the orchestra and soloist Sarah Chang with nary a slip or miscue in a familiar but risky program of Romantic favorites that do not fly well on automatic pilot.

An orchestra such as this need make no apologies about playing standard repertory, and one of Mehta’s strengths is precisely that he interprets this music within solid, conventional parameters. That does not mean that the climaxes are not fairly won, however, and it does mean that there are no compromises or accommodations made for the young musicians.

This has always been a hard-working ensemble and on Sunday its efforts paid the biggest dividends in Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique,” which had obvious energy and enthusiasm very much in its favor. The strings did not know quite how to deal with the ancillary matter of a broken violin string, requiring some barked instructions from Mehta as the offending instrument was passed through the section following the first movement, but their playing in the ensuing waltz was confident and accomplished.

Although only 16, violinist Chang is a much-tested veteran and the Tchaikovsky Concerto has become her signature piece. She plays with it now like a cat playing with an appreciably feisty but nonetheless doomed mouse. Some of the play seems mannered, and some of it idiosyncratic to the point of distortion, but it seldom fails to make an outsized point or two.

Mehta kept the accompaniment supportive and generally in close coordination with Chang, no mean feat without a score in music with more stops and starts than the Broadway bus. Mehta and his charges seemed to be just getting a feel for the hall, however, in their program opener, a stodgy account of Wagner’s “Meistersinger” Act I Prelude.