Camerata is a musical treat

Sunday afternoon's concert by the Camerata Orchestra, led by guest conductor John Morris Russell, proved to be another welcome musical treat amid Bloomington's vibrant classical music scene.\nThe orchestra, founded in 1989 by current concertmaster Lenore Hatfield, offers a professional-quality performance opportunity for the Bloomington community. Its affiliation with the world-renowned School of Music virtually guarantees its place among the best "community" orchestras in the country. Sunday's performance at Bloomington High School South supported this assumption.\nRussell, who serves as the associate conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, proved himself able to command the 83-member ensemble with a precision and lightness of touch that well served the opening bars of Bedrich Smetana's overture to "The Bartered Bride." The popular work, which began the program, features a precariously quick fugato for strings (including the usually awkward basses) that was executed here with impressive coherence. The rousing overture was slightly marred only by overpowering brass, who were perhaps unwisely placed on risers.\nThe second and third works of the afternoon, played without pause, were Beethoven's two Romances in G major and F major for violin and orchestra. The solo spotlight was occupied by IU faculty member Yuval Yaron, who seemed intimately familiar with the music. The Israeli-born violinist tossed off phrase after phrase of gorgeous melody with a nonchalance that might at times have seemed a bit detached, but always with a radiant, singing tone and flawless intonation. The orchestra, under Russell's attentive conducting, served as a sensitive accompanist, keeping pace with Yaron's expressive shaping of the solo line.\nThe next piece, also featuring Yaron, was the enormously popular "Carmen" Fantasy of Spanish violinist/composer Pablo Saraste, who based his work on themes from Georges Bizet's gypsy opera "Carmen."\nMost of Saraste's music features the violin and, like the Fantasy, provide ample room for the soloist to display bravura technique. This Yaron accomplished, despite struggling with a few skittering passages in the violin's treacherous uppermost register, and infused the spirited gypsy music with a dashing vitality the audience responded to loudly. He was called back to the stage three times amid cheering applause.\nTo close the concert, the orchestra presented Ottorino Respighi's massive symphonic tone poem "The Pines of Rome," meant to musically depict four scenes of nature in and around the Italian city. The first movement, "The Pines of the Villa Borghese," presented children playing in the villa's groves and burst with bright, joyous sounds from woodwinds, harp, celeste and glockenspiel. Momentum was kept unflagging by Russell, who was animated and drew quick responses from the musicians.\nThe festive mood gave way to "The Pines Near a Catacomb" of the second movement, painted with broad, somber strokes in the orchestra and featuring an otherworldly offstage trumpet solo by principal Amy Schendel, a graduate student.\nThe third movement, the celestial nocturne of "The Pines of the Gianicolo," was delicately handled by the Camerata and included lovely solos by clarinetist and graduate student Min-Ho Yeh, English horn player Anna Mattix, also a graduate student, and cellist Carlos Izcaray. A radical innovation for its time (1924), a recording of a twittering nightingale played at the end of the movement, added a flavorful touch.\nThe final scene, "The Pines of the Appian Way," depicts with ever-intensifying strokes of timpani and bass drum the marching footsteps of the Roman army from centuries past. Antiphonal brass placed at the back of the auditorium added an extra sonic dimension to the thundering end, which made a bold statement but was kept within the bounds of good taste by Russell's keen sense of balance.