Chamber Orchestra of Phila.: Intriguing, less-known works, on the light side

The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia threw open the door to its future on Monday. It was one of the more wide-reaching programs in its recent history - and it had music director Dirk Brosse's fingerprints all over it.

The previous administration limited Brosse to standard classical repertoire. Now, he mixes lesser-known works by Gustav Holst, Bela Bartók, Ernest Bloch, Malcolm Arnold, Max Richter, and Philip Glass - many of them trafficking in the film-score world, much like Brosse - all leading up to music from the Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho.

Fascinating, all, and played in ways that showed minor works aren't necessarily minor experiences. But collectively speaking, do such shorter, less substantial works build into a program worthy of the Chamber Orchestra and its audience? As long as every concert isn't like this one - and Ignat Solzhenitsyn returns April 3 and 4 with a crunchier Bartók/Mendelssohn program - I'm all for it. Better to have Brosse being his best self than conducting Haydn and Mozart with only half-convincing results.

Holst's wistfully folksy St. Paul's Suite received a particularly empathetic performance, and Bartok's wonderfully fragmented, exclamatory Rumanian Folk Dances gave concert mistress Miho Saegusa high-personality solo opportunities. The Arnold Flute Concerto No. 1 - more cerebral and inward-looking than his urbane, atmospheric second flute concerto - surrounds the lyric solo flute writing with an attractive, varied scenic design in sound. The middle movement is an intimate, through-composed journey that never blatantly commits to any specific meaning - and thus invites hugely different reactions on each hearing.

Soloist Edward Schultz, the orchestra's principal flutist, gave the challenging piece everything it needed. He was even more confidently colorful in the Bloch Suite Modale for Flute and Strings, though this halfhearted piece is the one dispensable item on the program.

Richter's On the Nature of Daylight, from his album The Blue Notebooks, atmospherically employs melancholy echoes of the English Renaissance, like the Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis but in an intensely reflective sensibility suggesting Barber's Adagio for Strings, and with a formal rigor recalling Pachelbel's Canon. Well, why not? The piece provided breathing room between the more animated Holst and Arnold works.

The main programming coup started with an orchestral version of Glass' String Quartet No. 2, a lightweight work with movements that don't conclude as much as they stop (though Brosse gave a clear sense that such episodes had done all they needed to do). Then came Bernard Herrmann's Psycho suite - which uses almost the exact kind of dreamy rhythms and thematic repetition as Glass does, though in a manner that's far less meditative, more restless, and covertly dissonant. Here, two composers of vastly different temperament, background, and generations did similar things and for vastly different reasons. The fundamental difference? Unlike Glass, Herrmann seems not to have been a Buddhist.

Singer/songwriter Andrew Lipke made a cameo appearance with a song titled "Let Me Finish" that began with a guy in the audience answering his cellphone - this was planned - and carrying on a loud conversation. Lipke arrived onstage, singing the actual song with his typical charm. Did he realize he was playing with an atom bomb? That phones are the zero-tolerance bête noire of the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society? Or that I have achieved minor celebrity by grabbing interruptive phones within my reach?

dstearns@phillynews.com