Master Sinfonia takes on hefty program

The “Unfinished” is dark, brooding and passionate, yet filled with the fruits of Schubert’s supreme melodic gifts. Despite its limited numbers, the orchestra presented the music with the power and intensity worthy of a larger and more professionally advanced ensemble. Lapses in ensemble and intonation were few. This was an “Unfinished” the way the work was meant to be heard.

Matching it was Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 102 in B-flat Major. This is one of the symphonies Haydn wrote to be played on his visits to London in his later years in the 1790s. It’s less well known than the ones with the famous nicknames like “Military” or “Clock,” but it may be one of the best of the bunch.

Haydn’s music is elegant, graceful and witty. In his London symphonies these characteristics come in packages that are large and expansive in shape. No. 102 is particularly notable for a very long slow introduction before the fast opening movement gets going. While the music is hardly as thundering as the “Unfinished,” the orchestra under Ramadanoff played it with similar heft and majesty. This was Haydn in the traditional style, eschewing the overly fast, lean and hungry “historically-informed” performances common today.

The third work on the program was also a symphony but one of a different kind as well as of a far different date. This was Benjamin Britten’s “Simple Symphony” for string orchestra, guest conducted by Pamela Martin. Written in 1934 when he was only 20, it uses music that the child prodigy had written when he was even younger. It’s witty like Haydn but without any of Haydn’s pretensions to grandiosity. All the movements are short and simple, but three of them — including a scherzo for pizzicato notes only — are fast and require wizardly playing.

The music got the playing it deserved here. There were few performance problems and those mostly in the opening movement. The slow movement, titled by the composer “Sentimental Sarabande,” is more serious than the rest and was approached with some of the expansive gravity that the orchestra brought to Schubert and Haydn.

This was an excellent concert with a regrettably small attendance. The Palo Alto High School Performing Arts Center is cozier in size and shape than the typical wide and spacious high school auditorium, and it has brighter and more reflective acoustics than is typical of the breed. This makes it an excellent venue for a symphony concert.

Master Sinfonia will be returning there on May 4 with a program featuring the most iconic of all symphonies, Beethoven’s Fifth, plus Dmitri Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1, with soloist Michael Li. Like last week’s program, this will be repeated the next day at Los Altos United Methodist Church.