Perhaps I'm merely overreacting to the first movement, which was on the distinctly slow-and-decorous side — a tempo that could work well enough if care were taken to make the long lines really reach their goals, and if the many affectionate nuances had not all been ritardandi. In the event, the piece seemed to start sluggishly, and conductor Michael Morgan never pushed even when the eagerness to move along seemed positively built into the score.

But it was impossible not to feel the affection of the players for the music — the violas, of course, but even more the winds, who made up an uncommonly sonorous and well-balanced choir of ten. And certainly the rest of the piece, was brilliant — the Scherzo with its reedy Trio, the eerie Adagio non troppo, the not-quite-prim Quasi Menuetto. And a Finale (Rondo Allegro) whose irrepressible joy more than made up for the fact that the intonation occasionally came unstuck. (Getting the piccolo into true octaves with anything else seemed to be the biggest difficulty.) All in all, it was a fine, and loving, performance.

Bright Sheng's 1997 Postcards, which preceded the Brahms on the second half, was that comparatively rare thing, a new piece that manages to be "audience-friendly" without overt condescension. The four short movements are full of arresting sounds, sharply-defined and easily-memorable ideas, and cunning orchestration, in a harmonic language calculated to intrigue the naïve ear rather than assault it. The textures are often fascinating. The shifting, glissando-laden string lines of the opening movement ("From the Mountains"), beginning from stark simplicity and building into something of considerable complexity, set the standard. (They are echoed, obliquely, in the last movement, "Wish You Were Here," where individual string players sigh glissandi in a desolate landscape dominated by eloquent and strangely-timbred wind solos — muted trumpet, piccolo in its lowest register, &c.). The inner movements are the fast ones: a bustling, brilliant "From the River Valley," whose kaleidoscopic shifts of orchestration were a constant delight; and "The Savage Land," a somewhat too obvious homage to Bartók (think second movement of Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, with added winds and brass). It was all vivid, and all very well played.

The first half of the program came off less well. Bravo to Morgan for opening a concert with Haydn, and not familiar Haydn at that, but the overture to his 1779 opera L'isola disabitata ("The Deserted Island"). The overture is practically a miniature symphony, in the agitated and abrupt style of Haydn's symphonies from earlier in the 1770s; it's pungent, harmonically rich, and tends to ambush you with disconcerting incongruities just when you were starting to think it had gotten comfortably bland (a little three-note figure in the minuet-section's trio, for example, starts showing up erratically in parts of the bar it had never been before).

A lot could be made of this music, by someone disinclined to treat it as "easy" in either the performing or the listening sense. I'm afraid I'm starting to believe that the ideal Haydn conductor, at least for an orchestra that hasn't played much Haydn, is a control freak, one of whose controls is marked "full throttle." You need the detail; you also need the ferocity. The OEBS had neither Friday night.

Owen Dalby, sometime concertmaster of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra and now a sophomore at Yale, was the soloist in the Mendelssohn E-minor Violin Concerto. A technical slip in the second of the two octave runs at the very beginning of the piece might have damaged Dalby's confidence from the start, but the performance as a whole suggested that he doesn't quite have the concerto in his fingers yet. He was at his best in the lyrical music — the second theme of the first movement was lovely both times, gently and poetically phrased, and so was the opening of the slow movement. Elsewhere he was variable — sometimes firm and brilliant, sometimes not quite in control, sometimes not projecting nearly enough. He tended to press ahead unexpectedly, and while Morgan generally caught the new speed quickly, the orchestra didn't always respond in kind. It was a messy performance, in short; but one with considerable promise in it.