DATE: Thursday, April 17, 1997              TAG: 9704170435

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B4   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Music review

SOURCE: BY ALLAN KOZINN, NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE 

DATELINE: NEW YORK                          LENGTH:   37 lines

VA. SYMPHONY STRIKES A CHORD WITH REVIEWER IN NEW YORK

The season about to end has been fraught with labor unrest, budget crunches and hand-wringing about the state of the music world. These worries are nothing new: Similar crises arise every few decades, and solutions that may seem painful at the time often prove workable in the long run. The remarkable performance by the Virginia Symphony at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday evening was a reminder that consolidation can have its benefits.

The Virginia Symphony began as the Norfolk Symphony in the 1920s, but when the recession of the late 1970s put several orchestras in peril, it merged with the Peninsula Symphony and the Virginia Beach Pops and took its current name.

It now plays a 42-week season that takes it all over Virginia. Most crucially, its performance on Tuesday was energetic, committed and, for the most part, finely polished.

JoAnn Falletta, the orchestra's music director since 1991, framed the concert with Barber's First Symphony and Elgar's ``Enigma'' Variations, works that showed off the orchestra's strengths, both section by section and as a polished ensemble. Falletta is a demonstrative, kinetic conductor, and if her gestures sometimes seemed excessively grand, they achieved clear results.

In particular, she brought a lovely sweep to the Elgar and elicited not only a rich, warm string sound but also superbly detailed wind and brass playing.

Between the Barber and the Elgar, Falletta led the New York premiere of Adolphus Hailstork's Piano Concerto, a neo-Romantic work packed with attractive melodies and almost Tchaikovskian opportunities for technical display. Leon Bates was the soloist, and he was equally at home in the ruminative lyrical sections and in the stretches of bravura scoring.

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