Young Musicians Bid Farewell to Conductor

Turnover is a given in the case of the Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra. The budding ranks of players making up this fine ensemble are often on the move, segueing into their professional lives in music, and the same goes for the upwardly mobile talent on the podium.

The subplot of Sunday’s season-ending YMF concert at the Wilshire-Ebell Theater was the send-off of gifted young Thai maestro Bundit Ungrangsee, who has impressively led the orchestra for three seasons and is headed for an assistant conductor position with the Utah Symphony. Among his laurels since coming to the orchestra: He was one of only nine conductors chosen to participate in the Sibelius Academy Conducting Master Class at Carnegie Hall earlier this year.

Ungrangsee didn’t skate on his way out of town. A refreshing and challenging YMF program tackled Shostakovich’s mighty and difficult Tenth Symphony, taking up the concert’s second half. Ungrangsee led the ensemble with sensitivity and muscle, from the brash and breathless excitement of the second movement to the hushed, coiling energy of the third, embracing the fleeting hint of a sunny disposition in the finale.

The orchestra opened (after a humble and thoroughly charming performance by the tender-footed Youth Mentor Artists Program Honor Orchestra) with new music, the brooding, angst-tinted and texturally clever final movement of 23-year-old Gordon Beeferman’s Symphony No. 1. Soprano Adina Aaron sang Berlioz’s “Les nuits d’ete” powerfully. She brandished a lucid and dramatic expressiveness that erred on the side of the operatic and commanded our attention.