The Vitality and Virtuosity Continue

Eighteen years after the retirement of Eugene Ormandy--its conductor for 44 seasons--the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1998 retains the plush and luxuriant sound identified all those years with the legendary music director.

As displayed Friday night at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa, the ensemble, two music directors later, plays like the virtuoso orchestra it has been for at least seven decades.

Wolfgang Sawallisch, the Munich-born conductor who has headed the orchestra since 1993, conducted the California leg of its current three-week international tour.

Friday, to close this North American segment before heading to Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Chile, Sawallisch’s program included Samuel Barber’s First Symphony, the Trumpet Concerto by the French composer Henri Tomasi and Dvorak’s Symphony No. 8 in G. The mix proved exhilarating, the performances brilliant from every part of the ensemble.

Most characteristic of the orchestra’s well-known musical profile was Dvorak’s Eighth, which became lush and lean, overstuffed and transparent, all at the same time. Sawallisch, a trim and energetic 74-year-old, keeps a tidy rhythmic ship, yet allows every piece its expansiveness. His conducting movements can be large, yet they never become frantic. On the podium, he is an attentive listener, but not a nervous one.

The shapely contours of the G-major Symphony emerged with a continuity that belied its familiarity; felicitous details of phrasing added a sense of newness. This old repertory friend turned out to be even more attractive than one remembered.

Barber’s impassioned, big-boned Symphony No. 1, which this orchestra introduced at its world premiere 60 years ago in December, remains unmistakably American in its aggressiveness, its irrepressible lyricism, and its surprises in its musical scenario. Played by this orchestra and led by this conductor, it sounded genuinely important.

David Bilger, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s principal trumpet, was the resourceful soloist in Tomasi’s Concerto (1948), one of 16 instrumental concertos the Marseilles-born composer wrote in a prolific musical life.

This lightweight, post-Ravelian work is highly attractive, pungent and harmonically jazzy. In the right mood, you might describe it as fun, a postwar romp of joie de vivre. In another, you could consider it merely innocuous. In any case, it does show off the soloist’s technique breezily.