Oakland East Bay Symphony review: hyperactive jazz concerto

Among the various innovative projects overseen by Michael Morgan and the Oakland East Bay Symphony is a commissioning program that puts the orchestra at the disposal of jazz and rock composers interested in expanding their creative horizons. It’s an admirable undertaking, even if the results can often seem more tentative than accomplished.

Friday’s robust concert at the Paramount Theatre, for example, featured the premiere of “Begejstring” (”Excitement”), a catchy but rather thin concerto written for and by the Danish American jazz violinist Mads Tolling. There was plenty of exuberance in the writing, and Tolling — who spent several years as a member of the Turtle Island String Quartet — deployed his amplified violin with dazzling technical assurance.

Yet the evident novelty of the assignment, and the sheer profusion of resources, seemed to have upset the composer’s sense of balance. You could hear Tolling’s enthusiasm at having so much to work with — a trap set and an orchestral percussion section! full woodwinds to complement the more traditional big-band brass textures! — without feeling that these were used in any consistently thoughtful way.

Instead, the piece’s three movements raced from one idea to the next like a toddler with a short attention span. During the first movement, Tolling traded phrases with the orchestra in various meters, then wandered off in search of a different melodic idea. The languorous slow blues of the middle movement — by far the most sustained and focused stretch of the piece — soon gave way to a hyperactive finale that threw country fiddling, boogie-woogie and an overextended bit of electronic looping into the mix.

The evening’s more traditional fare proved less novel but more satisfying, beginning with a first-rate rendition of Barber’s youthful and too rarely heard Symphony No. 1. Cast in a single unbroken span that encompasses a traditional four-movement structure, the piece trades in clear, bold rhetoric, and assistant conductor Bryan Nies gave it a forceful, strong-lined account.

Morgan was on the podium again after intermission for Haydn’s “Mass in Time of War,” one of the flood of great mass settings that the composer produced near the end of his career. This may be the most dramatic of the bunch, with its thunderous choral writing and the ominous tread of timpani in the concluding “Agnus Dei.”

Morgan elicited both the drama and the reflective splendor of the score, bringing rhythmic power to the forthright sections that frame the piece and lyrical beauty to the more intimate passages in between. He was aided in this by the eloquent singing of Lynne Morrow’s Oakland Symphony Chorus and the Pacific Boychoir Academy under Kevin Fox. The vocal soloists were soprano Julie Adams and mezzo-soprano Zanda Svede — both of whom contributed stirringly bright and shapely singing — along with tenor Chong Wang and bass Anthony Reed.

Joshua Kosman is The San Francisco Chronicle’s music critic. E-mail: jkosman@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JoshuaKosman