A performance of Mozart concerto with twists

Voluntarily or not, Symphony in C incongruously wandered into the Christmas spirit during Mozart's

Piano Concerto No. 21

on Saturday at the Gordon Theater in Camden.

In the first-movement cadenza, pianist Alexandre Moutouzkine departed from anything I've ever heard in that section of the piece, and not inappropriately. In Mozart's time, classical musicians improvised as readily as their modern jazz counterparts, and the solo cadenza was the perfect place to do so. Early on, Moutouzkine focused on a motif from the concerto but could not seem to get away from it. His own harmonic touches were getting ugly, but then, out of the welter of notes, came "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing." And not just bits of it. He practically played the whole thing.

I have heard worse. Moutouzkine's musical prank might have sat better had the rest of the performance shown a greater sympathy for the music. His sound, phrasing, and touch were so lacking in expressive precision that only conductor Rossen Milanov's accompaniment conveyed the piece's intentions. Moutouzkine's recent chamber-music recitals presented by Astral Artists left me thinking he could do no wrong. But nobody is that consistently good. Perhaps it is best to just turn the page on this youthful lapse.

The rest of the concert had a notably gutsy performance of Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. Gutsy? Usually it's a big-orchestra piece, but Milanov held it to 30 players, allowing the different choirs within the orchestration to emerge more eloquently. String players lined up separately at the rear of the stage, echoing the 16th-century instruments of Tallis' time. The performance showed you what you have always loved about the piece. And at times, the strings summoned an imposing sound, as if their numbers had suddenly tripled.

The second half had the perfectly calculated exuberance of Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 4 ("Italian"). It's postcard music, and if performers don't get in the way, audiences love it. And that's what happened.