Young Artists Ensemble Excels

Youth is not wasted on the American Russian Young Artists Orchestra Chamber Ensemble.

If anything, it added a special sense of innocence and the immediacy of first love to the 10-part program Thursday in the resonant, 300-seat Symphony Hall--formerly a church--at the Orange County High School for the Performing Arts in Santa Ana. The program was part of the Eclectic Orange Festival.

The eloquent Russian and American musicians, ages 17 to 26, some of whom already hold positions in professional orchestras, performed solos and in ensembles of up to 12 players led by Kristjan Jrvi. The composers included Americans Copland and Piston, Russians Alexei Zhivotov and Gavril Popov, emigres Rachmaninoff and Martin, and Frenchmen Saint-Sans and Ravel.

Drawn from an orchestra founded in 1987 as a diplomatic effort to help bring the two countries together, the players performed at the highest level, with an added poignancy to their self-consciousness in accepting applause and in our knowing that these particular musicians might not perform together again.

Among the excellent playing was a radiant performance of the first movement of Dvorak’s Second Piano Quintet by violinists Elena Fikhtengolts and Nadezhda Palitsyna, violist Alina Goloubo, cellist Boris Lifanovsky and pianist Alexei Podkorytov.

There was no encore. Instead, bassoonist Gina Valvano, 24, of the Manhattan School of Music, in response to the acts of Sept. 11, sang “God Bless America.”