Orchestra of Argentina Gives Spirited Effort

Celebrating the 50th anniversary of its founding, the National Symphonic Orchestra of Argentina completed a brief world tour Thursday night in Pasadena Civic Auditorium--having played in Tokyo on Monday.

Pedro Ignacio Calderon, the orchestra’s artistic director, conducted the Pasadena concert, which comprised a short suite from Falla’s “El Sombrero de Tres Picos” (The Three-Cornered Hat), the Guitar Concerto (1984) by Lalo Schifrin and Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony.

The 80-member touring ensemble is highly accomplished, if not yet virtuosic in its musical resources, and plays spiritedly. Its performance of the “New World” Symphony showed moments of high polish from the sometimes inconsistent string sections and the many virtues of a most gifted brass choir. The orchestra’s woodwinds, however, sound more provincial.

Calderon comes close to running a tight musical ship; he keeps his readings buoyant and within sensible rhythmic and dynamic boundaries. He produces a carefully balanced, if not transparent or resonant performance.

The conductor’s approach to four excerpts from “Three-Cornered Hat” elicited many of the charms in this familiar score, despite some ragged execution. This was a stylish reading of music that at its best is irresistible to most listeners.

Schifrin’s kaleidoscopic and difficult Guitar Concerto, played effortlessly by soloist Eduardo Isaac, sets the guitar protagonist against a substantial symphonic apparatus.

Isaac, aided by amplification and Schifrin’s inventive orchestration--which effectively uses the entire orchestra, in particular its aggressive brass--prevailed breezily.

The piece, pungent and colorful, is a reminder that the Buenos Aires-born composer was once a scholarship student at the Paris Conservatoire, where his teacher was Olivier Messiaen; without ever becoming derivative, the concerto keeps alive the ghosts of Stravinsky and Milhaud.