Flattened rhythms disappoint

{TABLE} Sinfonia India ............................ Chavez Violin Concerto ........................... Stravinsky Symphonie fantastique ..................... Berlioz {/TABLE} CARLOS CHAVEZ (1899-1978) was one of the major forces in Mexican musical life during this century. He was the founding conductor of the Orquesta Sinfonica de Mexico bin 1928, sometime director of the National Conservatory, and first director of the National Institute of Fine Arts.

His best known orchestral work is the second of his seven symphonies the single movement Sinfonia india. This dates from the mid 1930s and unusual in his output in that uses actual Indian melodies (in its original guise it called for a battery of Indian percussion instruments, though, as the composer expected, it is usually played with familiar equivalents rather than grijutian, teponaxtles or tlapanhuehuetl).

The music is brightly coloured, gaudy and has a pulsing, driving energy, with much use made of shifting metres. It was heard from the NSO last night under visiting conductor, Enrique Batiz, who has established a reputation in the music of his native Mexico.

Strangely, though, it was given an oddly unsatisfactory performance, flattened out and rhythmically unsprung, as if Batiz were taking the artful primitivism of the music more than a shade too literally.

Canadian violinist Chantal juillet was the forcefully prepossessing soloist in the Violin Concerto by Stravinsky. In a way she seemed to work rather against the laconic nature of the writing the standard violin concerto repertoire did not appeal to the composer, who regarded Schoenberg's concerto as "the only masterpiece in the field Juillet did a lot to bring a digging into the string virtuosity to the piece impressive in its own way, but it left the orchestra's contribution sounding more authentically Stravinskian than the soloist's.

Batiz, though not the most precise of conductors the NSO has had of late, delivered a big hearted account of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, not subtle enough to make a great deal of the "Scene in the country", but generously warm of colour and effective in its chase after the climactic effects of the last two movements.