YMF Orchestra Copes With Adversity

Around 6:20 Saturday night, John Farrer, the music director of the Bakersfield Symphony, had his feet propped up comfortably at home, thinking he was done for the day after finishing a rehearsal with his orchestra. Then the phone rang. Wilson Hermanto, the young conductor of the YMF Debut Orchestra, had been in an auto accident earlier that morning and was in the hospital with a broken rib. Could he, Farrer--Hermanto’s coach and a member of the YMF music advisory board--take over Sunday afternoon’s concert at the Wilshire-Ebell Theatre?

Thus, the YMF season-opener proved to be an unexpected lesson in coping with adversity--albeit in truncated form, for the difficult Schoenberg Chamber Symphony No. 2 had to be scrapped because, according to Farrer, it was “one rehearsal short” of performance. Calmly, with a restrained conducting technique, Farrer took care of the rest of the program, leading a brisk performance of Mozart’s Overture to “The Impresario,” presiding over the Los Angeles premiere of Gordon Getty’s Three Waltzes and closing with Dvorak’s not-often-performed Symphony No. 6.

Under the circumstances, one could understand why the orchestra sometimes sounded a bit downcast in spirit; in particular, the Dvorak’s delightful Scherzo Furiant lacked fire. But despite some less-than-immaculate passages, the symphony’s Finale came to life, especially the rapid string figurations in the Presto section near the end.

The Getty pieces, originally written for piano, turned out to be a very pretty, courtly, melodic, unabashedly diatonic set of miniatures with an occasional bent for the unexpected--like the violent chromatic gusts from the violins in the first waltz. Getty does have his own voice, a reticent, solitary one that keeps the noises from the 20th century at bay but not entirely out of earshot.