Mostly Mozart performances seldom attain the level of musical polish of Philharmonic concerts or evenings at the Met. The band is a collection of skilled freelancers rather than a permanent ensemble, and with two or more different programs to present each week, it's clear that rehearsal time is dauntingly limited. But even the occasional roughness of these events has its virtues: an air of informality prevails, reinforced by the summer reconfiguration of Avery Fisher Hall — the orchestra thrust forward into the house and surrounded on all four sides by listeners. Rather than the two factions sitting at opposite sides of the proscenium arch, the performers handing their august musical pronouncements down to the audience, here we all convene for the sheer pleasure of music.

The relaxed atmosphere seemed to benefit singers in the first few concerts, helping them deliver fresh, free performances. On the festival's opening night (July 28), following Leif Ove Andsnes's incandescent reading of the third Beethoven piano concerto, Alice Coote offered Haydn's 1795 cantata Berenice, che fai? — a 12-minute scena, proto-Romantic in its expressive intensity. (Two years later, Beethoven used it as a model for Ah, perfido!) Coote, a lyric mezzo, here sounded like a dramatic soprano, her top particularly free and incisive. At times she declaimed with so much force that the tone turned guttural, but this was clearly an interpretive choice, conveying the distress of the tormented heroine; elsewhere Coote, drawing on her rock-solid technique, projected a clean classical line. Mostly Mozart music director Louis Langrée here showed himself as a sensitive accompanist (as he had for Andsnes), sustaining the singer's primary role in the work's musical hierarchy.

Britten's Serenade for Horn, Tenor and Strings, featuring Toby Spence, comprised the vocal portion of the July 31 concert. The work's poise and restraint made it an apt companion to the Mozart pieces that bracketed it. In the program's first half, Piotr Anderszewski, playing the B-flat piano concerto, no. 18, had suffered from ramshackle orchestral accompaniment. But conductor Edward Gardner had obviously lavished special care on the Serenade. The delicate playing, along with Lawrence DiBello's sensitive rendering of the strange, beautiful horn part, evoked Britten's moon-dappled nights.

When Britten began the Serenade's tenor role on a quiet treacherous high A-flat, he wasn't simply tailoring it to the special gifts of Peter Pears, its first performer, but defining a vocal type. Ideally, the dry, ethereal sound of that first note will inform the tenor's voice throughout his range. Spence has a juicier voice than Pears, or than Ian Bostridge, who has championed the role in recent years. He attacked the A-flat falsetto, with a perceptible registral break as the line moved down its octave span. The full-throated sound in his midrange was in and of itself is a pleasure to hear, but perhaps too robust for this particular piece. Spence's indistinct diction, too, kept him from fully entering into Britten's haunting sound-world.

It was nonetheless a pleasure to encounter Spence a few nights later (August 4), the vibrancy of his timbre contributing to the exuberance of a buoyant reading of Stravinsky's Pulcinella. Bass Matthew Rose was a bit shallow of tone, but through well-gauged accents he gave the spiky vocal writing its proper rhythmic thrust. Best of all was mezzo Karen Cargill, a gifted mezzo with a voice so round that it seems to have no edges at all. She achieved a lovely effect in the repeated last line of her aria "Ancora poco meno": the second time around, the volume was halved, but the tone remained as plush as at mezzo forte. But the evening's big news was the local debut of French-Canadian conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin. This Pulcinella was rough around the edges — even the orchestra's normally reliable concertmaster, Krista Bennion Feeny, flubbed some solo opportunities. But it was full of vitality, with an underlying rhythmic propulsion that carried all before it. This was informal music-making at its best.

FRED COHN

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