The Chicago-based violinist Rachel Barton Pine, director for the NCCO’s current, season-ending set, is a player of rare refinement and rarer inquisitiveness. In Sunday’s performance at San Rafael’s Osher Marin Jewish Community Center, repertoire and playing alike bore her distinctive stamp. (The program repeats June 10 at San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre.)

Pine, a dedicated cultural ambassador who runs her own foundation, doesn’t exactly shun the standard repertoire, but over the past 15 years she has made a repeated point of poking around outside it — taking up both Baroque violin and fiddle, championing Joseph Joachim’s neglected Violin Concerto, and the like. Her most recent project — delving into the repertoire of the late-19th-century American virtuoso Maud Powell — is characteristic of her nose for interesting byways.

The NCCO program drew on another of her interests: the music of composers of African descent. In 1999 Pine recorded a disc of violin concertos by black composers for her usual recording label, the Chicago-based Cedille, including the work of the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, which opened Sunday’s concert. (As part of its African Heritage Symphony Series, Cedille has also recorded the other two works on the first half of this program.)

The composer known as the Chevalier de Saint-Georges bears a life story so irresistibly romantic that you might be forgiven for thinking it fictional. The son of a French plantation-owner on Guadeloupe and his (enslaved) mistress, Saint-Georges was brought up as though he were a legitimate son and trained in a gentleman’s pursuits. Following his father back to France, Saint-Georges shortly became one of Europe’s most celebrated swordsmen, as well as a violinist of great renown.

Composer a Formidable Violinist, to Boot

To judge by his violin concertos and symphonies concertantes, which in recent years have been finding their way finally onto recordings, Saint-Georges was a formidable violinist, as well as a more than ordinarily cogent and disciplined composer. In terms of the cut of the themes and the general design, the concerto on Sunday’s program (the A-Major Op. 5/2) is closer to Mozart’s concertos than to anything else in the current mainstream violin repertory. Yet the technical demands are greater.

As Pine pointed out before the performance, Saint-Georges sends the violinist a fifth higher up the fingerboard than Mozart does in any of his five concertos. But to a violinist the passagework presents more startling difficulties than the high notes. There are some real doozies in both outer movements. The complicated bariolage and the wicked run of broken tenths in the first movement, the flashy sextuplets laced with awkward string-crossings in the last — these are all the more impressive for being dropped stealthily into the midst of a solo part whose dominant character is suave songfulness.

Pine herself heightened this effect by sailing through the difficulties with the merest raised eyebrow to mark their onset. Her playing was scrupulously neat, disciplined, instinctively elegant; there was no waste of bow or effort or, indeed, anything else. The concerto soloist as swashbuckling hero this was not, despite the temptations offered by Saint-Georges’ biography. Instead it was cultured, understated, devastatingly accomplished, and (with Pine’s narrow, fast vibrato) ineluctably French-sounding — rather like the historical Saint-Georges, I imagine.

As is its wont, the NCCO matched Pine’s manner and sound perfectly, playing with great refinement and, if anything, an excess of tact. It would have been nice if Pine had separated the violin sections antiphonally; as it was, the seconds were somewhat buried behind the firsts. And in the Rondeau finale, in which Pine’s aversion to open strings in the theme would have mystified the composer, the NCCO players followed suit, with the result that the music had little of the bright, open character that the key of A major usually does in string music. All the same, this was lovely playing, detailed and sharply responsive to Pine’s direction.

A Newly Discovered Composer

The remaining two pieces on the first half were new to me and, I imagine, to nearly everyone else present. George Walker was born in 1922 and is still with us (and composing, at that — the worklist at MMB Music’s Web site contains entries from as recently as last year). He won a Pulitzer in 1996 for his Lilacs for soprano and orchestra.

Walker’s Lyric for Strings is a very early work, written in 1941 for string quartet and originally titled Lament (the eventual title was substituted at his publisher’s suggestion). In its string orchestra guise it has evidently become Walker’s most-performed composition.

Whether that’s just or not it would be impossible to say without hearing more of his music, though the piece is lovely. A brief idyll, emotionally reserved but not cold, it has something of Barber’s melodic cast. Once or twice, a turn of phrase recalled to me the Mahler of the “Adagietto.” The NCCO’s gentle performance was beautifully judged, transparent but warm.

Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s Sinfonietta No. 2, subtitled “Generations,” is a different sort of beast. In naming their son after the black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Perkinson’s parents might have been stacking the deck as to the child’s ultimate career. Certainly Perkinson (1932-2004) repaid the favor handsomely in this 1996 work, its movements each dedicated to a member of his family.

Perkinson’s music is often syncopated, but faux-jazz it is not. I was reminded less of the Afro-American musical tradition than of the likes of Bloch, Bartók, and Milhaud. The first two come to mind in the vigorous contrapuntal writing for strings; the last, in Perkinson’s taste for thick, chordal textures moving primarily in parallel. That, indeed, seems like something of a compositional tic, at least in this work.

Cheeky Glissandi

The opening “Mysterioso” introduces the parallel-chords business early on, with the lines moving in fifths at first and later in denser harmonizations. The second movement “Alla Sarabanda” begins and ends with some gorgeous writing for the violas (richly played by NCCO’s three). The following “Alla Burletta,” mainly pizzicato but decorated with cheeky bowed glissandi in the lower strings (and some great slap bass from Karl Doty), is a hoot.

The finale (“Allegro Vivace”) follows straight on from the third movement, in a blistering fugato opened by the violas. Later, the violins and violas layer on more of those dense parallel waves of sound over a wild, unruly cello/bass groove. The movement, which weaves in material from the other three, makes an exhilarating conclusion to a singularly attractive piece.

NCCO’s performance was polished in sound and tight in ensemble, though it didn’t seem to me entirely comfortable. The ensemble’s way with the syncopations was a touch stilted: Everything was in the right place, but without the zing in the bowstroke (and the left hand) that bespeaks full confidence with the rhythm. Partly, I suspect, this was again an instance of the orchestra’s following Pine’s lead. She is miserly with her bow, and uses vibrato by way of accent much less than is usual. A little more rhythmic swagger would not have been out of place.

After such a colorful and novel first half for the entire ensemble, the one-on-a-part Brahms sextet (in B-flat major, Op. 18) following intermission would have needed a once-in-a-lifetime performance to compete. In the event, it was merely (expectedly) well-played, and consequently a bit of a letdown. Pine, joined by NCCOers Deborah Tien Price (violin), Linda Ghidossi-DeLuca and Cassandra Lynne Richburg (viola), and Joanne Lin and Robin Bonnell (cellos), dominated temperamentally as well as dynamically.

The B-flat Sextet is effusive, generous early Brahms, full of good tunes and the sort of momentary, soaring solo moments for the inner parts that amateur string players live for. The NCCO players, to be frank, could have used more of the chamber-music-reading-party vibe. Even Ghidossi-DeLuca, the NCCO’s heady-toned principal violist, sounded unusually reserved, while Lin on the meaty first cello line was positively demure at times. (Bonnell, by contrast, seemed alone to be getting into the spirit of the thing, somewhat to the detriment of his bow hair.) Despite some exquisite quiet playing in the maggiore part of the slow movement and a madcap final accelerando in the finale, the performance never really took off.

One way in which the Akademie challenges its musicians is through its revival of the practice (pre-19th century) of the conductorless orchestra. In performances of C.P.E. Bach’s Symphony in C Major, W. 182, No. 3 (1773), and Stravinsky’s Apollon musagète (1927), the Akademie players relied only on each other, with occasional help from Canin as concertmaster, to stay together in these two demanding scores.

Playing without a conductor is especially daunting in C.P.E. Bach’s schizophrenic music. Even the most tranquil passages can give way to outbursts of 16th and 32nd notes without a moment’s warning. Perhaps out of necessity, the Akademie minimized contrasts in dynamics and expressive character in order to pull off the feat. The ensemble managed to keep together while navigating the score, but the composer’s erratic and improvisatory style was sometimes lost. In an effort to give the music shape, crescendos and decrescendos were applied almost perfunctorily.

This did not greatly diminish the orchestra’s achievement, however. The downsized ensemble (consisting only of string instruments and harpsichord), coupled with the church’s vibrant acoustics, provided the best of both worlds: the textural clarity of an “early music” ensemble with the majestic resonance of a full orchestra.

If the liveliness of the “Classical style” was somewhat tamed, it is a sound that modern audiences have nonetheless grown accustomed to, largely through the legacy of the second composer of the evening. Apollon musagète belongs to Stravinsky’s “Neoclassical” period, a particularly cold, [a]stringent phase of the composer’s career. Disdaining as he did the emotional excesses of Romanticism, Stravinsky might well have welcomed the orchestra sans conductor as a way to minimize the “deformation” (his word for performers’ personal interpretation) imposed on his works.

Challenged by Lack of a Conductor

The absence of a maestro again proved a considerable obstacle. Apollon musagète is permeated with the propulsive dotted rhythms of French Baroque music. Without a conductor helping to articulate the tempo, however, the orchestra plodded through these rhythms with heavy feet, as if forgetting that the music was written for the ballet.

The orchestra locked into form in time for the Coda, the most kinetically engaging movement of the piece. Here, with the help of pervasive syncopation and numerous metrical shifts, Stravinsky’s Baroque rhythms seemed to transform into the “swing” rhythms of Dixieland jazz. Stealing glances at my fellow concertgoers, I distinctly saw heads tentatively bopping, feet innocuously tapping.

After the string-dominated first half, the appearance of woodwinds and brass in Mozart’s “Posthorn” Serenade in D, K. 320 (1779), gave the orchestra a delightfully startling depth of sound, like a black and white photo suddenly recast into blazing hi-def color. The woodwinds, in particular, played with a purity (not a Stravinskian, abstract purity but a Mozartian, human purity) that was at times breathtaking.

The Mozart Serenade also saw Nagano taking the conducting reins, and the result was a blast of fresh air. The muddiness of the first half was transformed into a crystalline sheen. The orchestra handled dynamics and rhythm with much greater nuance. While the “dance” movements of the Serenade were not actually intended for dance (the piece was written to accompany a graduation ceremony), Nagano’s crisp, rhythmic precision made the piece more evocative of physical movement than Stravinsky’s ballet.

The “Classical style” is still a contested idea today. Only recently have musicians begun to untangle it from the 20th-century “Neoclassicism” with which it used to be conflated. Although the latter tends to sacrifice personality and expression for clarity and precision, Nagano and the Berkeley Akademie Ensemble gave the audience a welcome reminder that it is possible to have both.

The program in Herbst Theatre opened with a rare performance of Beethoven’s Septet in E-flat Major, Op. 20, and the premiere of Belinda Reynolds’ Bridges, a piece apparently designed to complement the Brahms Serenade. (There were no encores.) This was the second of four performances of the program around the Bay Area — all of them free.

Brahms is a strange case. He is one of the best known and least known of composers, since his reputation is largely propelled by his orchestral works — which are scant, 13 in all if you count the four concertos. Yet his major activity was as a composer of piano, songs, and chamber music, most of which is unknown to the general public. (I ask you, when was the last time you heard a live performance of Brahms lieder? Many of them are grouped in important cycles, such as the 15 knightly Magelone-Lieder, Op. 33.)

The five-movement A-Major Serenade is all youthful sunshine and charm, lacking any of the dour Romantic colors that later became a Brahms trademark. Among other things, the Scherzo is likely the best he ever produced, brimming with musical puns. It shows the composer’s orchestral slight of hand, since he achieves the colors in a chamber orchestration without violins. Clearly, he understood, from early on, the vibrance of violas in their higher registers.

Gold Star Performance

Under Conductor Benjamin Simon’s urging, the orchestra took to the piece with all the zestful panache of a major orchestra. Technical matters were all well-placed: intonation, unity of ensemble, style, balances, accurate dynamics. It’s Brahms before he went into the masterpiece business, to use Virgil Thomson’s phrase. This Serenade performance deserved a gold star.

Not as much can be said of the first two pieces, though. The Beethoven Septet, his most performed work during his lifetime, is actually a six-movement serenade (or divertimento), scored for a tiny chamber orchestra. His instrumentation calls for one each of clarinet, bassoon, horn, violin, viola, cello, and double bass. One measure of its immediate appeal is that Friday’s audience applauded after every movement. The piece, minus the Beethoven fist to the sky, is all charm and wit, but is heard all too seldom because of its unusual combination of instruments.

Trouble was, this time out it was performed minus conductor. That’s tricky for seven players, and it showed. Here and there, intonation slithered from the path, and ensemble playing was less than perfect. Yet on the whole, count this as successful.

Reynolds’ Bridges, commissioned by the S.F. Chamber Orchestra via a San Francisco Arts Commission grant, uses much the same instrumentation as Brahms’ Second Serenade. There, the similarities end. It’s approximately 10 minutes of largely ostinato minimalist hubbub. Now and then a few South American underpinnings of rhythm could be heard.

But the piece mostly sounded 1970s retro, well past its sell date. It offered terribly old-hat techniques and was both poorly orchestrated and flabbily organized. It just sort of sat there passing the time and waiting for the grass to grow — a prelude to an event that never happened.

I began to associate the piece with old travelogue sound tracks, with a narration like “And now as the sun sets, we bid farewell to the beautiful Amazon. …” Too, the general effect was unaided by a rather messy, struggling performance. As with Rossini’s appraisal of Wagner’s Tannhäuser after his first encounter, “It is music one must hear several times, but I shall not go again.”

Nevertheless, the concert will remain important, principally as a worthy tribute to Brahms, as well as a hint of what’s in store when Michael Tilson Thomas leads the San Francisco Symphony in its three-week Brahms Festival, May 8-24. That event will even include some of Brahms’ neglected songs for women’s chorus. To which I say, sing on!

It would take a heart of stone to dislike the concept or execution of the “Variations” concert that the orchestra offered at four venues last weekend. Music Director Benjamin Simon recruited two talented principal soloists from among colleagues at the San Francisco Conservatory, then assembled for them a coherent program of Baroque and modern works (Bach, Vivaldi, Roberto Sierra, and Joaquin Turina).

The results were mostly delightful on Sunday at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church. And when the mix wasn’t perfect, the cause usually lay beyond one orchestra’s control: It involved inherent problems of blending modern instruments with Baroque music, and with each other.

David Tanenbaum

The first soloist was David Tanenbaum, an internationally renowned guitarist who chairs the Conservatory’s guitar department. The second was Audrey Vardanega, a pianist and student in the Conservatory’s Prep Chamber Orchestra. At age 12, Vardanega has already compiled a resume that most people won’t achieve in a lifetime. She’s won awards both as a piano soloist and as a composer, also plays violin, and studies acting at American Conservatory Theater. Not bad for seventh grade, even at Berkeley’s Crowden School.

Audrey Vardanega

The concert began with Vivaldi’s Guitar Concerto in A Major, RV 82, a piece that took a little unpacking on Sunday. The opening Allegro non molto revealed some shaky intonation among the strings. It also immediately posed the problem of the classical guitar as an orchestral instrument (and I write here as a guitarist): Even discreetly plugged into a small amplifier, Tanenbaum could barely be heard against the ensemble.

Reticent Guitar

Vivaldi originally wrote this piece as a lute trio, and its two remaining movements better showed off the orchestral version. In the Larghetto, the guitar stood out nicely, while the orchestra blended sonorously as one big, and consistently tuned, continuo.

The closing Allegro really blossomed, with more open harmony that revealed the textures of individual strings (notably, the principal cello). Here, the guitar’s inherent pizzicato contrasted effectively with an ensemble that had permanently found its groove.

A natural bridge between Tanenbaum’s two guitar solos was a Spanish piece, albeit with neither Tanenbaum nor guitar. Joaquin Turina’s La Oración del Torero (1925) is a 10-minute tone poem portraying a “Bullfighter’s Prayer” and ensuing battle. This too was expanded from a lute setting — first a lute quartet, later arranged as a string quartet. The orchestral version is a flurry of colors and tempos. The Seville-born Turina interweaves Spanish folk influences with the planing ninth chords he absorbed from Debussy and Ravel in early 20th-century Paris. It’s a lyrical, captivating, and challenging piece, whose shifts the orchestra handled deftly.

Tanenbaum returned for Roberto Sierra’s Pequeño Concierto for Guitar and 5 Instruments, which the Puerto Rican-born composer wrote for him in 1998. The other instruments are flute, clarinet, oboe, violin, and cello. The result was another panchromatic 10-minute work — a kaleidoscope for these instruments’ contrasting colors. Sierra (whose Borikén tops Berkeley Symphony’s March 13 program) has the six musicians chase, imitate, and blend with each other above a 3-3-2 ostinato, and often over pedal tones.

Strains of the opening “Ritmico” recalled Stravinsky’s writing for woodwinds. The closing “Preciso” had rolling downward passages that made me think of Copland, with his open chords’ thirds (and sevenths) filled in — Americana tropicale. The six performers showcased all of this beautifully. The irony is that despite its top billing, Tanenbaum’s guitar part was incidental to much of the color palette. It served largely as the ensemble’s rhythm section, with occasional foregrounding as a percussion instrument.

Mastery From One So Young

The program’s all-Bach second half began with Vardanega’s solo, the Piano Concerto in F Minor, BWV 1056. The young performer strode out confidently, and played with assurance and mastery to match. Her touch throughout was quite legato, which slightly undercut the nimbleness of Bach’s writing and her articulation. But on another level, it worked. This concerto is a fiercely striding piece, and Vardanega’s tone reminded me surprisingly of jazz pianists in the Stride tradition (think of the recently deceased Oscar Peterson).

I have a hunch that I won’t be quibbling with Vardanega’s interpretation once she reaches the ripe old age of, say, 14.

The concert closed with the Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F Major, BWV 1047. Featuring four solo instruments (trumpet, flute, oboe, and violin), this work was cleverly programmed to mirror Sierra’s instrumentation. A Baroque crown jewel, the Second Brandenburg is also extremely hard to pull off. SFCO encountered two problems in getting the blend right.

First, Scott Macomber’s trumpet part (itself extremely difficult to play) tended to overshadow his fellow soloists. Second, Robin Sharp’s solo violin, in particular, was sometimes overwhelmed by the ensemble of modern strings behind her. Flutist Tod Brody and oboist Peter Lemberg held their own pretty well. And all the performances were impressive, especially when the mix worked.

So it was as PBO (though a somewhat beefed-up ensemble, replete with clarinets, five cellos, and three basses) that Nic McGegan’s merry band played a not-remotely-Baroque program at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church Saturday night. For all the finesse and dazzle of the orchestra’s playing on its original home turf, McGegan’s occasional excursions into the 19th century are a special treat.

Not only does his wit lend itself brilliantly to the likes of Schubert and Beethoven, but there’s the undeniable thrill of an orchestra approaching the music immediately after 1800 from the other side. It is easy, in our familiarity, to forget how new, strange, and big that music once felt — how unruly, how fierce. Philharmonia sounds firmly at home in the 19th century these days, but never merely at ease.

At the head of the program came Beethoven’s mammoth “Emperor” Concerto, starring the indefatigable Robert Levin at an impressive behemoth of a fortepiano. The instrument, a 1985 copy of a Viennese instrument built in 1814, belongs to Bay Area historical-keyboard player Charlene Brendler. Besides a six-octave range and a penetrating sound in all registers, it boasts an array of auxiliary sound-effects (bells, drum, cymbals) for use in playing the janissary (Turkish-military-style) music popular at the time. According to one of the players, Levin actually made use of some of these stops during the opening concert of the set in San Francisco, two days earlier. Not — to my mingled relief and disappointment — on Saturday, though.

Commander at the Keyboard

Levin was his usual brash, impetuous self. He was in complete command of the concerto’s torrents of glittering passagework, and anything but shy about wrenching sound out of the instrument, whose lower octaves came in for some furious pounding. It was a performance that rarely paused in reminding you that the piano is a percussion instrument.

The piece gave Levin fewer opportunities than, say, the Mozart concertos do for his favored brand of impish showmanship. Still, his habit of swiveling around to look pertly at the winds every time he and they traded off material is as strong as ever. As he typically does, he accompanied the orchestra throughout most of the tutti passages. He is subtle about this, burrowing into the texture unobtrusively and only occasionally letting himself be heard, always to good effect.

The performance’s range of colors and characters was wide. I’ve heard more elegant and easeful renditions, but few as sheerly exciting as this one. The outer movements were crammed to bursting with energy, from soloist and orchestra alike. Levin was continually champing at the bit (in the finale, he galloped through the theme so impetuously as almost to overshoot himself at the top of the phrase), and the band in the tuttis was like a controlled explosion, taut and rambunctious.

At the same time, the quiet playing was uncommonly beautiful. Levin’s instrument has a top register of unearthly delicacy and clarity, and where he tinkled away up there to minimal accompaniment (as in the first movement’s second theme or through much of the slow movement), the effect was magical. So was the long duet with Philharmonia’s incisive timpanist, Kent Reed, near the end of the finale. And while the fortissimo tuttis packed a bracing punch, the orchestra’s great refinement — particularly in the playing of an unusually mellow and unified wind band — was equally telling.

All Clear and Sunny

That combination of brashness and suavity also suffused the concert-ender, Schubert’s D-Major Third Symphony (D. 200). The work may not be often played, by comparison with its three immediate successors (to say nothing of the late, great Eighth and Ninth), but it’s brimful of charm and Haydnish — occasionally even Beethovenian — brio. With the winds, led suavely by first clarinetist Eric Hoeprich, in blissful accord, and the strings dainty and droll in the slow movement, McGegan’s Third was winningly sunny.

When called for, the band played boldly, even fiercely. I realized that this isn’t, after all, a “small” piece, despite its touches of winsome cuteness. It has genuine heft and weight, and by the end of the finale there was no question but that it deserved its place at the end of a program that had opened with the “Emperor.”

The real discovery of the program, though, came in between. My acquaintance with the music of Anton Reicha (1770-1836) is limited to a handful of pieces of chamber music, mostly for winds or various wind and string combinations. (He also composed a long and reputedly fascinating series of fugues for solo piano, but they seem to be alluded to more often than played.) Nothing I’ve heard of Reicha prepared me for the D-Major Overture performed by Philharmonia Saturday night — the wildest find I think I’ve ever heard on a Philharmonia program.

Its peculiarity is that it’s written in 5/8 meter throughout. By the end of the 19th century, quintuple time was a recognized, though rare, possibility (think of the quasi-waltz second movement of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony). But at the time of Reicha’s undated Overture it must have been virtually unprecedented, and I can only imagine the conniptions that the work’s original performers must have had over it. Even for ears accustomed to odd meters, it’s tricky enough. (Reicha stitches the five rapid eighths most often as three and then two, but the reverse happens enough to catch you out repeatedly. I was still missing the occasional stitch at work’s end.)

Above the level of the measure, the piece is laid out with disconcerting regularity. The phrases are balanced and matched in such a way that you keep groping for a ghost-piece in a “normal” meter that seems always to be hovering just behind what you actually hear. It’s like a parquet of familiar and spacious design, only tessellated with what prove, the minute you look more closely, to be stubbornly bent, irregular shapes. It’s bizarre, deliciously scored, and wholly captivating music that I, for one, can’t wait to hear again. Any chance that this work will make its way onto Philharmonia’s growing collection of downloadable recordings? We can but hope.

In a sense, though, moving in both directions at once was precisely the goal of “Rewind,” a concert given on Saturday by the New Century Chamber Orchestra. On the one hand, “Rewind” obviously aimed to move backward. Its title speaks to the order of the program’s pieces, which progressed in reverse chronological order. The concert thus began with 20th-century pieces ranging from Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso No. 1 (1977) to Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (1902; rev. 1943). It concluded with a piece from Henry Purcell’s opera A Faerie Queen, which dates from the last decade of the 17th century.

On the other hand, while the program moved back through time, conceptually it also aimed to move forward. Paul Haas, a New York City conductor, originally created “Rewind” for Sympho, his ensemble in that city. Sympho’s slogan is “Orchestra: Circa Now.” Both Sympho in general and “Rewind” in particular aim to update the traditional concert experience in an effort to appeal to audiences under the age of 40.

Even when transported to San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for its West Coast premiere, “Rewind” fast-forwards the traditional concert via hip, multisensory stimulation that includes creative lighting, a kinetic sculpture suspended from the ceiling, electronic music, and innovative use of the performance space.

The kinetic installation was created by Reuben Margolin, a Berkeley-born artist whose sculpture was commissioned for the concert. His piece was an enigmatic conglomeration of white, rodlike pieces that undulated slowly, smoothly, and silently, like a giant mechanical jellyfish swimming above the performers. With the help of colored spotlights, the installation was an ambiance-changing chameleon, but its blend of grace and colossal scale was nonetheless mystifying.

Music From on High

While perched on a balcony, composer and DJ Mason Bates supplied electronic music that unwound at the start of the program, as well as occasionally between pieces. Other musicians, usually wind players, also performed from the balcony. Another innovative use of the performance space was the main-level concert setup: The musicians performed on an elevated box in the center of the room, while the audience sat in rows forming a square around them. Before the concert, Haas explained to me that such seating is one way that “Rewind” aims to dissolve any separation between performers and audience members.

The concert’s programming innovation involved more than the reverse chronology of the pieces. First, the program was entirely continuous, with neither an intermission nor pauses between pieces. Short, specially commissioned works by three contemporary composers — Bates, Joshua Penman, and Judd Greenstein — filled the would-be pauses and connected the pieces. The program’s continuity spoke to its goal of keeping the audience so engrossed in the performance as to eliminate the need for breaks.

Second, individual pieces were selected to reference multiple historical eras. For example, the Serenata from Stravinsky’s Pulcinella referenced Pergolesi, an 18th-century composer, while Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso referenced a genre that flourished in the late 17th century. Just as these pieces transported historical composers, genres, and styles into 20th-century compositions, “Rewind” aimed to convey classical music in a contemporary setting.

In short, from innovative programming to awe-inspiring visuals, “Rewind” sought to keep its audience engaged. But did the performance succeed in doing so? It certainly did, according to my date for the evening, a nonmusician whom I have dragged to countless concerts. He said “Rewind” was the best concert we have ever attended together. He is neither a classical music aficionado nor someone over the age of 40, and precisely for those reasons, he falls within the program’s target audience. Judging by his opinion, “Rewind” resoundingly achieved its goal of engaging this group.

As much as I would love to endorse wholeheartedly a concert that makes music appeal to new audiences, I nonetheless have reservations about “Rewind.” For example, I fully intended to pay careful attention to the violin solo in Alexander Raskatov’s piece, which featured the guest artist Anne Akiko Myers. But she performed from the balcony, and Margolin’s installation separated her from me. I did not pay her due attention, being distracted by the lights and moving art.

Music for a Multitasking Generation

Perhaps my multitasking and multiprocessing skills are simply below average for what the program notes dubbed the “iPod generation” to which I must belong. Then again, “Rewind” featured both multisensory stimulation and a large number of short pieces. (Schoenberg’s piece was by far the longest of its 21 connected works.) So perhaps “Rewind” insinuates that these iPod shufflers are also a Ritalin generation that needs a variety of stimulation to stay engaged at a concert because it cannot stay focused on anything for long. Either way, I felt insulted.

Both the spectacle and the continuous, rapid-fire succession of pieces seemed to enhance my date’s experience while simultaneously detracting from mine. It was indeed exciting to be within a few feet of the performers, particularly the violins, but ultimately while I was less physically separated from the performers, I felt musically estranged from the cellos.

In the end, I appreciated what “Rewind” aimed to do: make a concert of art music appeal to younger audiences who might find the traditional concert hall uninvitingly antiquated. Or, as Haas put it to me, “Rewind” aims to combine the best of classical music with the best of modern art and technology. I think it achieved this goal, while sacrificing what a traditional concert does well, which is to present complete, sometimes lengthy pieces in an environment in which you can focus intently.

For me, therefore, the program format seemed both a step forward and a step back. The youngish audience gave it a standing ovation.

The Akademie — which presents one more concert this season in May 2008 — is distinguished from its parent organization, the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, in a variety of ways. The smaller, more flexible ensemble allows for programming variety, and for Concertmaster Canin to lead some works from the first chair. The ensemble also emphasizes international artistic collaboration. Performing alongside the Berkeley Symphony members were six members of Germany’s Junge Deutsche Philharmonie (German Youth Philharmonic). Finally, the group collaborates with UC Berkeley’s music department to foster discussion and understanding of the concert’s music. Wednesday night’s program included several interpolated lectures by UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus Joseph Kerman, and by Robert Commanday, a former lecturer at the school (and the founding editor of SFCV).

The German spelling of the ensemble’s name draws a connection to a European model of music-making, and calls attention to Nagano’s current conducting position in Germany. According to an e-mail I received from the Berkeley Symphony, “Akademies were founded to share music, which had been primarily reserved for the court, with the community at large. As general music director of the Bavarian State Opera, Maestro Kent Nagano stewards one of Europe’s oldest Akademie (or ‘Academy’) concert traditions, which you can now experience firsthand in the Bay Area!”

If the goal of the Akademie is to bring music to a larger community, the $60 ticket price seemed a little off the mark. (Those who are on the Berkeley Symphony’s e-mail list could purchase tickets at 50 percent off starting about one week before the concert.) Furthermore, the concert was held in one of Berkeley’s smaller venues, the First Congregational Church, with a capacity of 653 people.

Lackluster Performances and a Lot of Talk

The concert was bookmarked by performances of two of Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concertos, opening with the Third and closing with the Second. Despite the organization’s emphasis on scholarship, this was a curiously romanticized Bach, played with heavy bowing and ample vibrato. Worse, the ensemble’s bowing styles were not always uniform, resulting in an uneven interpretation.

Both Brandenburg Concerto performances were marred by poor balance, a problem that was evident throughout the concert. This was partly due to the location of the performance. As the performers noted during the postconcert discussion session, First Congo (as it is affectionately known) is an incredibly live space. The ensemble had difficulties compensating for the acoustic during the performance. The Second Brandenburg Concerto suffered most acutely. While all four soloists (violinist Stuart Canin, flutist Emma Moon, trumpeter David Washburn, and oboist Laura Griffiths) performed wonderfully, from where I was sitting I heard a great deal of Washburn’s virtuosic trumpet playing and precious little from the others.

The middle two pieces on the program were Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue (arranged for string orchestra and led by Stuart Canin) and Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen. The Grosse Fugue was well-played, but here the balance problem proved particularly vexing, making the distinction between fugal subjects and accompaniments difficult to hear. Metamorphosen, a masterpiece of Strauss’ late style, was led from the podium by Nagano. His conducting was assured and powerful, but his interpretation was not entirely convincing. The performance supplied a long series of high points, with less of a sense of the underlying line. And while there were many moments of lovely solo playing from the entire ensemble (of 23 solo strings), passages of bad intonation and quite a few wrong notes suggested that the piece had been under-rehearsed.

The musicology portion of the evening was informative but long-winded. Both Kerman and Commanday made many excellent points, but occasionally drifted from the topic at hand. Due partly to the lectures, the rather short program was stretched into a long evening, with the final postconcert talk ending around 11:10 p.m, over three hours after the concert’s start.

The ideas behind the Akademie are indeed laudable. I hope that the organization will undertake all that’s necessary to meet them.

Batjer’s program was unusually tight in focus for NCCO, sticking to the first three-quarters of the 18th century. For me, the concentration was entirely welcome, but the orchestra itself seemed almost embarrassed by it. Paula Gambs’ “Message From the President” in the program booklet called the concert a journey “through more than 150 years of the world’s most wonderful music.” Batjer herself referred to a 100 years’ span, but 50 is more like it — from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Fourth Brandenburg Concerto (1721) to one of his son Carl Philipp Emanuel’s “Hamburg sinfonias” (1773). This was a concert covering a fairly narrow band of music history, and all the better for it.

The NCCO has always seemed to me a mite uncomfortable with the fact that a good chunk of any string orchestra’s first-class repertoire lies in the Baroque. It does regularly program Baroque music, but doesn’t generally sound at home doing it, and its recent approaches have varied from stilted, tiptoeing “correctness” to hearty, full-blown Romanticism, and everything in between. Under Batjer, the players achieved an accommodation with the style that was more convincing than I have heard from them before.

Connecting the Dots, Getting Into the Flow

The signature qualities of the playing were incisiveness, wit, clarity, and a willingness to dig in with the bow to the point of grittiness. Welcome, too, was the orchestra’s legato. One of the most annoying tics of Baroque style as persistently misunderstood by modern-style string players is a perverse notion that two notes played with separate bowstrokes should always have a space between them. Somewhere along the line, a lot of modern players got the idea that legato in Baroque music is unstylishly romantic. Where this mistake came from I don’t know — certainly not from period-style string players, who don’t play like that and, so far as I know, never did — but it’s distressingly common still.

The NCCO on Wednesday was altogether free of that mannerism. It was lovely to hear the fourth-movement aria of Handel’s Concerto grosso Op. 6/11 phrased with such flowing, seamless naturalness. In fact, the Handel was the peak of the program, a graceful, alert, zippy performance, with a kind of ever-replenished effervescence. Batjer in her solos ran lightly and easily, taking evident joy in the music’s motion. The NCCO’s Candace Guirao (principal second violin, breaking out her Baroque-era bow for the occasion) and Robin Bonnell (principal cello) responded in kind.

The Geminiani work, a concerto grosso transcription of Corelli’s Violin Sonata in D Minor, Op. 5/1, was nearly as fine. The slow movements of Geminiani’s Corelli transcriptions present an interpretive problem. In the sonatas, the violin line is skeletal in the extreme, and the violinist was expected to provide rather spectacular embellishments. (Many early editions provided samples of the sort of thing intended, including one whose set of ornaments purports to be the composer’s own.) What do you do when such a piece is expanded to a full string section?

The NCCO played the first phrase of the concerto’s opening movement absolutely bare, which I took as a bad sign. I ought not to have worried. In subsequent phrases, Batjer elaborated the line with increasing daring and imagination. She never overdid it, and contrived, if that’s possible, to sound completely free of contrivance. An awful lot of modern-style players embellish with all the spontaneity and naturalness of after-dinner speechmakers. Either it’s all too clear that the player has laboriously composed each minute deviation from the printed text, or (worse) you find yourself hoping that what you just heard was done extemporaneously, because the thought of its having been worked out beforehand is too dreadful to contemplate.

Batjer’s embellishments were at once thoughtful enough to have been planned and so effortless as to make you sure they weren’t. Both here and in the Handel and Bach works (where her ornamentation was sparser, but just as fine), she set an example that any number of modern-style players — and not a few “period” ones, for that matter — would do well to follow.

Youthful Haydn Symphony Played With Zest

The New Century doesn’t ordinarily include wind players, except as occasional soloists, so Haydn’s Symphony No. 8 in G Major (”Le Soir”) was a distinct departure for the ensemble. I can’t see them making a habit of it — once you open the door to the entire chamber-orchestra repertoire, where do you stop? — but this performance was a terrific success, crisp and virtuosic and altogether a great, gleeful romp.

The piece is almost a miniature concerto for orchestra, with prominent solos not just from the winds but from two violins, cello (Bonnell, enviably easy of tone but not quite secure of pitch), and bass (Anthony Manzo, delightfully deadpan). The guest winds played standing, as NCCO usually does, and being behind the strings without benefit of risers put them at something of an acoustical disadvantage. Nonetheless they put out a splendid sound. Flutist Emma Moon’s lightning flashed particularly brilliantly in the symphony’s thunderstorm-finale.

The C.P.E. Bach Sinfonia in E Major, Wq. 182/6, is a tight little firecracker of a piece, packed with dynamic, harmonic, and rhythmic shocks that scarcely have time to clear before the next one arrives. It’s the sort of work that is as raw meat to the more abrasive kind of period-style orchestra. The NCCO did a creditable job with it, not stinting the dynamic range and registering the music’s wilder turns well, but it still retained too much good breeding to do the thing full justice.

The Fourth Brandenburg Concerto, too, was a bit of a letdown after the excellence of the Handel and Haydn. For the first and only time Wednesday night, there was some of that old, mincing “be careful, everyone, it’s Baroque” manner in evidence. Not from Batjer, I hasten to add, whose account of the solo part was invigoratingly gutsy (and, in the swirling rapid passages in the outer movements, phenomenally distinct). But the orchestra was often self-consciously delicate, particularly in the inner parts. Possibly someone was worried about overbalancing the flutes that here substituted for Bach’s recorders. The actual balance problem, in any case, was quite the other way, with the flutes far too prominent relative to the string body.

All in all, though, this concert showed what the NCCO can do with 18th-century music when the players put their minds to it and when the leader has so sure a command of the style. We can only hope that whoever emerges as the ensemble’s new leader can do as well.

Joined by the renowned Moscow Chamber Orchestra and the Academy of Choral Art Choir of Moscow, under the direction of the American conductor Constantine Orbelian, the combined forces put on a show of vocal, choral, and orchestral music that ranged from the liturgical to folk, cabaret, and even rock. But it was Hvorostovsky, with his compact, lithe body swathed in smooth black and his perfect control of a beautiful, expressive baritone voice, who was the brilliant star of the show.

By his own admission, Hvorostovsky is not a believer. Yet in a selection of religious offerings, accompanied by only the youthful choir, his voice took on a fervency and warmth that surely belied his unbelief. But of course, he has that Russian soul: ardor and devotion suffused his unfaltering, perfectly supported legato. Come to Me, All You Who Labor, gospel verses from Matthew and John, were powerful and touching in their turn.

The choir, in the opening Cherubim Song, was beautifully controlled in its softer singing, and somewhat Slavically strident in the louder. They were an attractive group, the women in wine-dark velvet gowns, ranged in a single arc across the stage, the men in black behind them.

Accompanied by the orchestra, Hvorostovsky produced a keener, more incisive tone, as he extended his compass beyond the deeply felt warmth and sincerity of the liturgical songs and presented a group of dramatic arias from Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tsar’s Bride and Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades.

Man of Many Moods

In these, the singer displayed, for example, the character of Gryaznoy, once used to taking a girl by force if he wanted her, but now tortured by a vision he is unable to get out of his head of a beautiful young girl to whom he has offered marriage but who has rejected him. “I am not the same man,” he sings, and Hvorostovsky limns both the virile, brutal, cold-hearted man he used to be and the wretched soul who now mourns the loss of his former wild, strong-willed self.

His singing of Onegin’s aria, “You wrote me a letter,” rejecting Tatiana’s offer of love, was self-righteously tender, while Prince Yeletsky’s passionate love aria from The Queen of Spades brought cries of approbation from the audience, a good third of whom must have been Russian.

The second half of the concert was devoted to folk songs and what must be, to my untutored ears, the Russian equivalent of soft rock. Suffice it to say that the Russian cabaret or rock pieces, whose subject matter was invariably the passionate, suffering, longing Russian lover, came complete with a floor mike for the singer and a rhythm section: the sole double bass player of the orchestra plucking away and, somewhere in the depths of the stage, a snare drum and high-hat cymbals.

Among the folk songs, which were all in minor keys, Only Once stood out for me, with the singer’s strenuously opened vowels fired by energy and passion. The pop-style How Young We Were and Tenderness were beautiful songs, and the closing song, I’m Grateful to You, pierced the soul almost unbearably. Gracing both the folk and cabaret songs were four additional instruments — two mandolins, balalaika, and accordion — taking center stage in front of the orchestra.

Increasingly younger girls, starting with full-grown and ending with a mere slip of a girl, brought bouquets of flowers at intervals from the audience to the singer — a charming touch. For the last presentation, Hvorostovsky bent down and took the child’s fingers in his, flashing his brilliant smile. The audience cooed with delight.

Encores were the well-known and beloved Moscow Nights and Dark Eyes. Somewhere my Russian forbears must have been dancing in almost painfully ecstatic gestures of pure pleasure.

As it happens, concocting a Vivaldi program bristling with variety and excitement is dead easy, as long as you avail yourself of the wildly scored ensemble concertos clustered toward the end of the Ryom (RV) Catalog. Philharmonia has done programs centered around those kitchen-sink extravaganzas before (and recorded several, on the Reference label). But doing the same with only a few solo instruments is more difficult. In Saturday’s concert at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church, the orchestra and guest leader/violin soloist Monica Huggett pulled it off with panache.

Scott Metcalfe’s excellent program note quoted Vivaldi scholar Michael Talbot to the effect that it is much easier to be sure you are hearing a Vivaldi concerto than to be certain which one it is. All the same, this program might have been designed to demonstrate that the “Vivaldi profile” is deceptively capacious. Four of Saturday’s six works (three for violin, one for oboe) belong to the set of six published by the Amsterdam-based publisher Le Cène as Op. 11 in 1729, while a fifth, for violin and oboe, has only a manuscript source. Tucked in among them was the familiar A-Minor two-violin concerto (RV 522) from L’Estro armonico, Vivaldi’s Op. 3.

Lesser-Known Gems

Huggett is to be thanked not only for programming a lot of seriously unfamiliar Vivaldi — the Op. 11 concertos are hardly ever played — but also for providing a point of reference in one much-played chestnut. RV 522, like everything in Op. 3, is full of fanciful solo excursions, but in Saturday’s company the most striking things about it were its balance and its meticulous design.

The Op. 11 concertos have a remarkable looseness, almost a largesse, of construction, throwing all manner of striking material at the listener and not bothering overmuch about taut organization. Were they longer than they are, they might be described as sprawling. As it is, they are if anything too short to connect up everything within them, and they dazzle through bewilderment as much as brilliance. By their side, RV 522’s rational regularity seemed almost prim.

There were striking differences of character among the Op. 11 pieces. No. 1 in D (RV 207) had the textural brightness Vivaldi tended to emphasize in that key, full of open strings and flashy string-crossings, and with a delightful pizzicato-accompanied slow movement. The A-Major No. 3 (RV 336) had textural curiosities of its own, most notably a finale in which the fast fingerwork was all in the solo and the bass line, with the orchestral violins playing long legato lines in the ritornellos.

The first movement of the same work contains some harmonic jolts that sounded not so much deliberately shocking as inconsequent. (At one point, the music cadences strongly in a fairly remote key and then is blithely reset back to A major, somewhat as though Vivaldi had composed himself into a corner and had to fudge his way back out.)

In the C-Minor No. 5 (RV 202), on the other hand, the harmonic shocks are plainly deliberate. This is a great snarling beast of a concerto — strenuous, grim, relentlessly serious in demeanor, yet also intensely imaginative. This is difficult music, and not just for the fingers. Huggett and the Philharmonia players, who cannily put this one last on the program, ripped into it with fervor.

Powerful Singing Lines

Huggett made a fine champion for her three concertos. Hers is an unusually full and powerful sound for a Baroque violinist, one that relies on bow speed more than on bow placement or pressure. She has, too, a great repertoire of articulative tricks, including a kind of well-off-the-string, pecking staccato that she used several times to brilliant effect. In the arialike slow movements she “sang” with a diva’s artfulness, inflecting her lines insinuatingly with the bow.

But in the singing department, Philharmonia oboist Gonzalo Ruiz was her equal and more. He played the other Op. 11 concerto, the G-Minor No. 6 (RV 460), with an uncommonly and consistently beautiful tone, not to mention a jaw-dropping fluency and ease. As befits the instrument, RV 460 is less hectic in its decoration than its violin siblings, but the notes still come at a blistering pace. Ruiz spun them off with the kind of nonchalant brilliance I’ve only rarely heard from a “modern” oboist, and I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed in a Baroque player. And his breath control was marvelous; in the outer movements the streams of notes seemed almost impossibly continuous.

Ruiz and Huggett joined forces in the B-flat Major double concerto RV 548, a cleverly designed piece in which the two instruments trade material at key points, while elsewhere diverge subtly to suit their respective strengths. Huggett delivered her part with customary dash, but in the outer movements I fancied Ruiz and his zingy oboe had the better of the argument. The slow movement was all his, an oboe siciliana to which Huggett contributed a delicate pizzicato accompaniment.

For RV 522, the violin soloists were Philharmonia’s Carla Moore and Jolianne von Einem. They made a fine team, complementary rather than identical, with Moore on balance stressing the sparks and von Einem the suavity. A long solo passage in the finale, with von Einem’s flowing cantabile floating over Moore’s sharply articulated string crossings, seemed to sum up their respective personas.

The Philharmonia strings followed Huggett’s lead and example avidly throughout the program, bringing depth of sound as well as brilliance to the full-ensemble passages. The only (slight) sour notes came in the slow movements of RV 460 and RV 336, in which the viola bass line that is the soloist’s only accompaniment was not quite so unanimous as it might have been.

After the astonishing RV 202, an encore was inevitable. There being no Vivaldi concerto for three violins and oboe, the players did the next-best thing and gave us a sparkling performance of the last movement of Vivaldi’s sole three-violin concerto, the F-Major RV 551. It was a reassuring return to more “normal” Vivaldi, and a bright conclusion to a vivid and variegated concert.