Young Musicians Under a New Baton

The music was familiar Sunday afternoon at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre, but the figure on the podium wasn’t. Thai conductor Bundit Ungrangsee opened his first season as music director of the Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra with an agenda of popular pieces calculated to display his--and his orchestra’s--technical abilities, but hardly indicative of a personal approach to program building.

Ungrangsee’s way with Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, however, proved vivid and persuasive. The adroit and communicative 26-year-old musician favored a broad dynamic scale, incisive accents and quick tempos, including a furious finale that would have left a less well-drilled ensemble in disarray. His young, enthusiastic orchestra coped fearlessly and at times even handsomely.

That was not always the case earlier, in that most noble of overtures, Beethoven’s “Lenore” No. 3. Nothing went seriously awry, but the playing, within Ungrangsee’s clean, largely conventional outline, seemed markedly more cautious, thinner in tone and more mechanical in delivery.

Concerto time brought back Debut alum Ivan Marin Garcia, now assistant principal of the Naples Philharmonic in Florida, as the soloist in Weber’s F-minor Clarinet Concerto. The composer shared some of the responsibility for the patchiness of the first movement, though Garcia needed much of it to get focused.

But the Adagio emerged with tender care, with Ungrangsee coordinating some beautiful orchestral chamber music in accompaniment, and the concluding Rondo held a full measure of insouciant sparkle. Garcia reaffirmed his lyric sensitivity with an unaccompanied Jewish folk song in encore.