Scott Cantrell

The Dallas Wind Symphony did its part for relations with Eastern Europe Tuesday night. In addition to that American cosmopolite Leonard Bernstein, the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center concert included two composers of Czech origins and one from Poland.

One of the Czech natives, Karel Husa, has lived in the United States since the 1950s and taught for years at Cornell University. The other, Antonín Dvorák, spent a fertile three years here in the 1890s. Polish-born Kazimierz Machala completed a doctorate at New York's Juilliard School and is now professor of horn at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Newest of the pieces was Dr. Machala's 2002 Concerto for horn, winds and percussion. Twenty-one minutes long, in the traditional fast-slow-fast three movements, it mingles pulsing motifs in shifting meters with graciously flowing melodies. There are hints of jazz in the rhythms and wah-wah effects.

If not, on first hearing, a particularly distinctive piece, it's attractive enough. Ably conducted by artistic director Jerry Junkin, with about half as many DWS players as in the program's other pieces, it had a dream soloist in Patrick Hughes. His tone was warm and honeyed, his virtuosity and legato both apparently effortless.

Mr. Hughes' encore, "Send in the Clowns," from Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music, got a standing ovation, but the accompaniment sounded a little ragged.

Mr. Husa's Music for Prague 1968 is probably one of the most-played classical compositions of the last 40 years. Written in response to the short-lived 1968 "Prague Spring" of freedom and the subsequent Soviet crackdown, it registers its protest in echoes of a traditional Czech hymn, nightingale twitters and noisy parodies of Soviet militarism.

Surely its every note is sincere, and Mr. Junkin led an intensely focused and sometimes deafeningly intense performance. But once again the piece struck me as more means than ends, with everything but the kitchen sink thrown in.

Bernstein's Symphonic Dances from West Side Story couldn't have been more different, but they made good first-half companions for the Machala. Mr. Junkin kept the electricity crackling through blazes of brass, clatters of percussion, hip-shifting sass and sultry ruminations.

Alas, he got overexcited in the Dvorák Carnival Overture, whipping the beginning and end into breathless hysteria.

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