The two works by living composers have both been heard in the Bay Area before. John Corigliano's Red Violin Chaconne was premiered by the San Francisco Symphony in 1997. (His Promenade Overture was the opening work in Symphony Silicon Valley's first concert two years ago.) Jennifer Higdon's Fanfare Ritmico was played at the Women's Philharmonic's farewell concert in San Francisco last March. Symphony Silicon Valley has now made its bid to help establish these as standard repertoire works of the future.

Higdon, now 41, teaches composition at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. More than many composers of her generation, she can write non-tonal, noisy, but consonant music that's attractive and engaging to a general concert audience. Certainly this audience enjoyed her Fanfare Ritmico and responded just as enthusiastically when it was repeated as an encore at the end of the program. Higdon's compositional secret is a strong sense of musical structure. Even a chaotic piece like this one, a tossed salad of echoes of numerous different styles, still manages to hang together. The scoring is built on percussion – thundering timpani and various other drums open the work – but the spotlight passes all over the orchestra, even to violin solos. As a composer whose orchestral style naturally tends to the bright, brittle, and brassy, Higdon was a good choice to contribute to the Fanfares Project, a program commissioning short works from women composers, echoing Eugene Goossens' World War II-era all-male fanfares project that produced one masterpiece, Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man. The works of the women's Fanfares Project are more expansive and more fully orchestrated than their predecessors, and Higdon's, at least, deserves to stay in the repertoire.

John Corigliano, a generation older than Higdon, writes very differently. He tends towards the lyrical even when he's writing “of rage and remembrance,” as in his First Symphony dedicated to the memory of AIDS victims. He's also a facile composer whose work can be pleasant to listen to but doesn't always have a lot to say. So it is with this Chaconne, a ruminative single movement about 17 minutes long, drawn from material written for his Academy Award-winning score for the film The Red Violin, the improbably lurid adventures of a wayward Cremona fiddle. Chaconne is beautiful, melodic, and clearly a major contribution to the violin concerto repertoire, but it seems to lack substance. Nor does it have much flair: the film music contains some fancy fast passagework, but the Chaconne downplays such easy crowd-pleasing in favor of less dramatic writing that's just as difficult to play but less likely to generate wild applause: long melodic passages full of double-stops, portamento slides, and occasional col legno bowing. The orchestra and soloist tried hard to meet the work's demands, but with mixed success, increasing in technical mastery but losing artistic control as the piece went on. Highest marks go to the orchestral strings, which produced a rich shimmering sound when called for.

Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony lives a bit in the shadow of its two mightier warhorse companions. Less tragic than the “Pathétique” Symphony, less dramatic than the Fourth, it has a recurring melodic Providence theme in place of the Fourth's stark Fate motif. Even more than the other two works, the Fifth relies on sheer beauty of melody, but also has stark dramatic moments, especially in the finale. Its challenge for conductors is to convey beauty and intensity without emotional overindulgence. When the performers have something new to say, even the mightiest warhorse is worth hearing again. This time it certainly was. Speaking before the concert to such members of the audience as were able to make their way past unbriefed ushers, locked stairway doors, and balky elevators to the third-floor rehearsal hall, Maestro Flynn outlined his vision. Sounding not so much like Roger Norrington unearthing original performance practice as Gunther Schuller scraping the barnacles of spurious indulgent tradition off the work, Flynn insisted that if performers would stick to the composer's marked tempo and phrasing indications, it would reveal a new, unknown Tchaikovsky.

We may not have heard an entirely new Tchaikovsky, but the performance was wholly convincing. This was a disciplined, unsentimental Fifth, but still intense and passionate. Flynn gave gentle fluctuations of tempo where called for without wallowing in ritards or executing crashing changes of gear. The occasional throbbing accents of typical performances were downplayed or disappeared altogether. The fabled melodies were not made meltingly beautiful: Flynn clearly did not intend anything to melt in this work, but he wanted it dry, not frozen. The most impressive result of de-emphasizing the lush was the decrease of incongruous contrast within the work. Flynn's brisk, matter-of-fact waltz in the third movement kept the filigree of the trio from sounding fussy or cluttered. His fast, unpompous rendition of the Providence theme in its broad last appearance in the coda of the finale prevented a frantic rushed and hasty feel in the concluding Presto. This was a fine rendition by a conductor who had thoroughly rethought the work and an orchestra able and willing to follow his direction.

The California Theatre displayed its bright, dry and harsh sound for this concert. The hall brought out the counterpoint in Vaughan Williams's work brilliantly, because the music was not too loud. The other works sounded best in quieter, clearer passages as well. But Tchaikovsky's climaxes simply overpowered the hall. The sound was so rich and rough in the string tutti passages that it became coarse in fortissimos, almost like a primitive hi-fi system whose sound breaks up when it can't handle the recording range of the disc it's playing.