Scott Cantrell

Rex C. Curry/Special Contributor

Gerhardt Zimmermann conducts the University of Texas Symphony Orchestra at the Meyerson.

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It wasn't much publicized, so there wasn't much of a crowd for the University of Texas Symphony Orchestra concert Wednesday evening at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center.

UT's Butler School of Music must be one of the country's biggest. In his second season as the orchestra's music director, Gerhardt Zimmermann – American-born, despite the Germanic name – had a huge violin section at his disposal. It wasn't always ideally refined, a reduced chamber-orchestra complement exposing little imprecisions of tuning and ensemble in a Mozart D major Violin Concerto (K. 218).

The concert's star contingent was the cellos, well focused and projected and impressively unified. Holst's The Planets also benefited from outstanding violin and horn cameos, and wind principals did their parts well. In general, brasses were OK, but not rock-solid.

Even in hushed, delicate music, Mr. Zimmermann favored enormous gestures. A more focused beat might have averted occasional loosenings of ensemble in the Mozart and Holst, even in Aaron Jay Kernis' atmospheric Musica Celestis.

Colleen McCullough, a doctoral student in musical arts at UT, was the capable soloist in the Mozart, with a big, gleaming tone if not the last word in elegance. Her cadenzas, with lots of double stops, didn't fit in at all.

A string-orchestra arrangement of the slow movement of Mr. Kernis' String Quartet No. 1, 10 minutes long, Musica Celestis has glowing clouds of string sound drifting and merging. Rising scales quicken the pulse, leading to busy dithers.

But the excitement drops away suddenly for more glowing chords. Finally, pitches are pushed higher and higher, ultimately into eerie harmonics.

Holst himself sometimes conducted only selected movements from The Planets, and Mr. Zimmermann contented himself with "Mars," "Venus," "Uranus," "Saturn" and "Jupiter," in that order. Starting with quite a brisk war-march, the performance was certainly extrovert, with perhaps the loudest sounds ever heard from a bass tuba and more thunder than we're used to hearing from the Meyerson's organ.

But those big beats didn't coax a lot of elegance, or as much sense of direction as the music wanted.