Training Continues of Youth Orchestra

Now on a 10th anniversary Pacific Rim tour, the 106-member Asian Youth Orchestra returned to Southern California on Sunday to play indoors at the acoustically welcoming Luckman Theatre at Cal State Los Angeles. Immediately, the young ensemble--representing talented players from 10 Asian nations, ages 15 to 25--improved its already vibrant sound profile: We last heard this group outdoors, at the Hollywood Bowl, four years ago.

Romanian-born conductor Sergiu Comissiona remains the orchestra’s music director. Sunday afternoon, he led a sololess (other stops on the four-week tour feature pianist Jon Nakamatsu and violinist Gil Shaham) program of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor (in the Stokowski realization), Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4.

Representing an admirable coming together of players from geopolitical entities with sometimes shaky relations--Hong Kong, Taiwan and China, for instance--the orchestra is no doubt a positive cultural organization. As for its primary mission, as a musical training ground, it holds its own.

The matinee delivered the scrubbed and careful performances one expects from not-yet-professional ranks. Even after nine tour performances of the Tchaikovsky symphony, occasional raggedness, a few sloppy entrances, marred this one. New thrills, or old thrills rediscovered, did not arrive.

Comissiona may be the right conductor for a training orchestra learning the mechanics and stylistic details of the repertory, but he does not push his players. Mozart’s 41st Symphony challenges conductor and ensemble to find the music in its too-many notes; here, as happens with most performances, one heard the notes and not the spirit that gives the work its name.

At the beginning, the Bach/Stokowski transcription was well-played but mostly passionless. At the very end, the single encore was the Waltz from Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings.