When the most familiar piece on the San Diego Symphony’s program is Sergei Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony, you know that something exceptional is afoot. Music Director Jahja Ling began 2010 with a delightfully eclectic and profoundly moving concert Friday (January 8) that took his faithful audience into some unusual byways.

For starters, how often do you hear two works for solo viola on a symphony concert? You are more likely to hear two lame viola jokes in a pre-concert talk than actually hear a viola concerto on stage.

The orchestra’s Principal Viola, Che-Yen Chen, whose winning technique has been showcased in various chamber music venues across town, played Handel’s "B Minor Viola Concerto" and Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Flos Campi” with the burnished and beautifully focused sound that is his calling card. On Friday, his impeccably nuanced, fluid phrasing and his stylish, effusive communication proved irresistible

At first glance, Vaughan Williams’ “Flos Campi” appears to be an unikely hodgepodge, the result of a twisted assignment from a crusty composition teacher: write a six-movement work for solo viola and chamber orchestra with a wordless chorus based on racy Biblical texts. Yet this rarely performed opus from 1924 is one of the composer’s most spiritual yet harmonically and rhythmically sophisticated works. It combines the elevated tone of his earlier "Mass for Unaccompanied Voices" (1922) with a sensuous orchestration that reflects the earthy character of the “Song of Solomon,” that Biblical book of erotic poetry that Sunday School teachers avoid fastidiously.

Twenty-six voices from the San Diego Master Chorale (stretched in two rows across the back of the Copley Hall stage) provided shimmering washes of sensuous color, acting more like instruments than a chorus, exactly as the composer intended. Ling molded all of these elements, including numerous limpid wind solos, into a rich tapestry that spoke directly to the soul with breathtaking eloquence.

As the Symphony’s program annotator Eric Bromberger elucidates in his notes, George Frideric Handel wrote no viola concerti, and the piece Chen performed that is given winking attribution to Handel was actually a clever fabrication by the early 20th-century violist Henri Casadesus. It is wholly understandable why violists feel unjustly neglected when it comes to solo repertory. Although the violin and viola appeared simultaneously in the mid-16th century, over the centuries composers have created a fllood of concerti for solo violin, including some of the most virtuosic and beloved in the symphonic repertory—think of violin concerti by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Bruch, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, Shostakovich, and Barber. Not one of these gentlemen thought the viola worthy of a concerto.

For the violists, sadly, the list of solo works with orchestra can be jotted down on one side of a small postcard, with room for the address and the usual “wish you were here” greeting. So Casadesus can be forgiven for confecting a Baroque-style three-movement viola concerto and doing it with a complete mastery of the late-Baroque rhetoric of Handel. The outer movements rattle along with perky counterpoint, and the slow middle movement gives the soloist a chance to spin out a cantilena that is simultaneously sweet and plaintive. Chen and the Symphony gave Casadesus’ imposter the refined, deluxe treatment of an authentic jewel.

There have been evenings at Copley Hall when Ling has appeared to be laboring mightily on the podium, micro-managing the entire score and sweating every phrase, dynamic change and entrance. Happily, this extreme effort was unnecessary with the Prokofiev Fifith Symphony, although it is a complex and busy piece. While Ling’s direction was clear and unwavering, he appeared—especially in the exuberant second and fourth movements—to be having a grand time, practically dancing on the podium. He displayed the ebullience of a class of third graders given a day off from school to attend the circus.

A work like the Prokofiev Fifth gives this orchestra a chance to put its best foot forward, with an expansive, densely-layered, wind-dominated orchestration with a large percussion battery. Ling confidently released this surging energy and tumultuous sonority, allowing its mighty roar to fill the room, yet without permitting so much as a hint of bathos. The orchestra’s ensemble and rhythmic precision has improved markedly over the season, and this piece only strengthened that impression.

Prokofiev was not a natural, prolific symphonist like his rival Dmitri Shostakovich, who completed a canon of 15 mighty symphonies to Prokofiev’s modest 7. Yet Prokofiev’s Fifth, his most mature and well-balanced symphony, offers rewards Shostakovich did not attain because Prokofiev allowed his humanism to suffuse the score without the undercurrent of cynicism and angst that Shostakovich could never exorcise. This symphony was written during the last year of World War II, yet it is neither brashly triumphant—as much of the Soviet public hoped it would be—nor does it linger over war’s darker horrors, although I hear elgiac overtones in the third movement “Adagio.” This Symphony No. 5 and his great wartime opera “War and Peace” are the lasting monuments to the genius and heart of Prokofiev.

But wait, there was more! In addition to the three works just described, Ling opened the concert with “Three Psalms of Jerusalem” (premiered in Cleveland in 1998) by the American oboist and composer Jeffrey Rathbun. Another work for large orchestra, Rathbun’s half-hour tone poem paints themes of estrangement, suffering, and peace that relate to the spiritual capital of the Jewish nation. Rathbun proved to be a highly skilled orchestrator and a deft painter of moods, although his architectural skills did not appear to have equal strength. Less might have been a whole lot more.

Throughout the piece I kept imagining this music as the soundtrack of a serious, indie motion picture, although in that respect it shares some of the character of John Adams recent Los Angeles Philharmonic commission “City Noir,” without the latter’s sophisticated jazz inflections. Nevertheless, it is always rewarding to hear newer music rather than the obligatory overture, a programming commonplace. The composer was present on Friday night to receive his due (at the edge of the grand tier rather than on stage) from the audience.

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