Crossover is something that Yi-Jia Susanne Hou believes in, and not just in music.

The Shanghai-born Canadian violinist, who played a solo recital in the Flagler Museum’s music series in 2009, is perhaps best-known for her work as a featured member of Bowfire, a multimedia fiddle extravaganza founded in 2000 that’s sometimes referred to as “Riverdance with violins.”

Hou says she’s fond of “blurring the lines” between the arts and other activities, and believes it serves the cause of art, and humanity, better.

“I like blurring lines, because I think a lot of lines exist for no reason,” Hou said over a late lunch Tuesday at Brio Tuscan Grille in Boca Raton, discussing a series of music-film-and-discussion programs she’s planning for a cruise line. “I don’t want the artists only to be on a pedestal onstage.”

Hou, 34, is a formidable violinist with an impeccable classical pedigree whose wide-ranging interests appear to be leading her into a multimedia-mogul direction. She’s the creator of a new show called Around the World of Music in 80 Minutes, a program of classical favorites from all over the globe, playing this week and next in Boca Raton.

Hou is one of several soloists, including singers, in the show, all accompanied by an eight-piece ensemble of string quartet, harp, piano, bass and percussion. There are tango and flamenco dancers, too, and the Fushu Daiko Japanese drum group. The ultimate aim, expressed in comfortable, unobtrusive staging -- “I wanted to enhance and highlight the performances” – is nothing less than bringing us all together.

“For the last 10 years, I’ve been making programs that visit all different kinds of music and cultures, because I love telling the audience how music influences each other,” Hou said. “How many things in our world draw people apart? But when you can listen to a piece of music, eat some food from a specific culture, it actually brings you closer to the people; you understand them.”

The show, which has played the Boca Community Church and the Coral Springs Center for the Arts, is now in the middle of a seven-show run at Boca’s Spanish River Church. Its final threee shows are set for 8 tonight and 8 p.m. Monday and Tuesday night at the church on western Yamato Road. She describes it as “essentially a classical music showcase, but with all the production values of a show like Bowfire.”

The program “tours” roughly 16 countries including the United States, which is represented by Scott Joplin’s The Entertainer and a medley of George Gershwin songs including I’ve Got Rhythm, played by pianist Yuval Fichman. Italy is represented by arias from Puccini operas (O mio babbino caro, Nessun dorma, Recondita armonia, and O soave fanciulla, featuring soprano Teresa Eickel and tenor Daniel Montenegro), China by a set of folksongs arranged for Hou by Yang Bao Zhi, and Poland by Chopin’s posthumous Nocturne in C-sharp minor.

The Czech Republic gets its moment in Hou’s passport book with an arrangement by Hou’s father, Alec (Bo Zhi), of the Smetana tone poem The Moldau. A version of its famous melody (which Smetana borrowed from Swedish folk music) was used in turn as the tune for Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem, which follows The Moldau on the program.

“I’m not doing this with religious intent, I’m not doing this to sing a national anthem or anything like that,” she said. “It’s to capture [the idea] that music provided, in the deepest, darkest moments, hope for people.”

Around the World of Music, whose title was inspired by the Jules Verne novel Around the World in 80 Days, opens with an arrangement of the Andante from Haydn’s Surprise Symphony (No. 94 in G, representing both Austria and England, where it was premiered), and closes with Hou soloing in the Spanish virtuoso Pablo de Sarasate’s take on Gypsy music, Zigeunerweisen (Op. 20).

Hou is planning future versions of the Around the World show, as well she might: Its current run is entirely sold out.

“It’s the first time I’ve ever done anything like that, and it was really fun,” she said. “It was an adventure.”

The remaining presentations tonight, and Monday and Tuesday night, of Around the World of Music in 80 Minutes at Spanish River Church are sold out, but interested concertgoers can get on a waiting list by calling 800-716-6975. Visit www.spanishriverconcerts.com for more information.

Husky-voiced singer-songwriter Ann Hampton Callaway has appeared eight times at the Colony Hotel’s Royal Room before her current engagement this week. While she has been much acclaimed, something was missing previously: Her younger sister Liz.

That has now been rectified with an 80-minute set, continuing through Saturday, that samples all three of the cabaret shows the sisters Callaway have concocted -- Sibling Revelry, Relative Harmony and Boom! Individually, they are very entertaining performers, but together their voices blend exquisitely and their faux-jealousy over each other’s achievements is bitchy fun.

The evening opens with a duet called Here Come the Callaways, a peppy piece of special material penned by Ann that cleverly likens them to other family acts, from the Jacksons to the Brontes to the Kardashians. Not long after, they attack Cole Porter’s Friendship, a celebration of camaraderie, undercut by numerous cutting remarks between the lyrics.

On occasion, they cede the stage to one another for some standout solo turns. Ann, who tends toward jazz, demonstrated her facility for scat singing on Rhythm in My Nursery Rhymes, about growing up as a hipster, accompanying herself with vocal impressions of a trumpet, saxophone and other instruments.

Liz, the younger, shorter, thinner sister, has concentrated much of her career on the Broadway stage, including debuting in the original cast of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along. It is almost a cliché for a theatrical cabaret performer to pay tribute to the vocally and musically complex composer-lyricist, and Liz seemed headed right for such a misstep.

Instead, after seeming to blank on the words to Company’s triphammer Another Hundred People, she launched into a send-up of the challenge of singing Sondheim -- Another Hundred Lyrics Just Went Out of My Brain. Incorporating the tempo-shifting challenge of several of his songs, the clever number was every bit as difficult as the real thing and Liz handled it flawlessly.

Boom!, their latest show, takes them both out of their familiar territory to songs of the ‘60s and ‘70s -- Baby Boomer pop hits. Here, they continued the sibling theme, combining their voices on The Righteous Brothers’ You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling, which lost nothing in the translation. And Liz got the crowd going on a pair of Petula Clark tunes -- I Know a Place and Downtown, complete with a bit of audience sing-along.

Surely the standout selection of the evening was The Huge Medley from Sibling Revelry, a collection of female duets, mostly from the theater, including Bosom Buddies from Mame; Liz’s featured number from Miss Saigon, I Still Believe; and A Boy Like That, from West Side Story. Without sacrificing anything musically, the two performers often planted their tongues firmly in cheek with over-the-top histrionics.

Ann Hampton Callaway is a terrific solo act, but if you are a fan of hers, you owe it to yourself to see her kick her game up a few notches when she performs with little sister Liz.

ANN HAMPTON and LIZ CALLAWAY, Colony Hotel Royal Room, 155 Hammon Ave., Palm Beach. Through Saturday. $115-$125 for prix fixe dinner and show. $55-$65 for show only. Call: (561) 659-8100.

I watched Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire less than 24 hours ago, and I’m already having trouble remembering exactly what the picture was about – some gobbledygook about private government contractors double-crossing one another, with one rogue special-ops agent targeted for knowing too much, or for the appeasement of her vengeful ex-boyfriend/employer, or something like that.

But I remember in vivid detail the blue light piercing through the window of a diner in the opening sequence, the urine-yellow filter over a scene of the agents planning their latest job, the crepuscular light fading toward darkness in one of the final scenes, and the director’s switch from black-and-white to color in an intellectually thrilling chase scene.

Haywire is only the latest style-over-substance success story, wherein the director’s rigorous formalism pummels every shred of distinction from Lem Dobb’s functional screenplay. Dobbs’ words essentially become the primer over which Soderbergh paints the movie in whatever dazzling hue he has in mind. The result is not as emotionally investing as Drive, but it’s cut from a similar cloth, and it’s probably more fun.

Beneath the color-coded visions lies a candy-flavored action vehicle for 29-year-old mixed-martial-artist Gina Carano as Mallory, an unstoppable secret agent whom, for whatever their reasons, pretty much every male character in the movie wants to kill. These include Ewan McGregor as an ex-boyfriend and sometimes boss; Michael Fassbender as her supposed partner with a malicious secret; and Antonio Banderas, sporting the ridiculous unkempt beard of a deposed dictator, as the apparent head honcho.

Again, I did not know, or care, what was really going on, and I don’t think Soderbergh did when he was filming it. Haywire is not Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, not by a long shot. Soderbergh’s goal, instead, is to pare down the spy film to its bare essence, avoiding the over-plotted clutter that drives everything from talky features to hour-long episodes of Burn Notice. Dialogue is at an absolute minimum, and even sound design is stripped entirely from the aforementioned chase scene, propelled only by the director’s inspired imagery and a coolly calculated score.

This is a movie infatuated with its own movieness, and spy-movie history. In Soderbergh’s stylized vision of international intrigue, names and locations – Paul, Barcelona, Dublin – are employed more for their aesthetic associations than their physical importance; it sounds hip and exotic to think of these exciting people bouncing across the globe, when in fact the entire film was shot in just two locales.

Symbols of seeming significance are breached only to be subsumed by the style: Soderbergh has a lot of fun exhibiting and then disregarding various Hitchcockian MacGuffins, such as a silver pendant and a captured Chinese whistleblower, both of them chicken feed in the grand scheme of things, which is to jettison grand schemes.

At the risk of sounding too much like a film theorist, let it be said that Haywire is an enjoyable mainstream movie even if you don’t buy in to Soderbergh’s intent. Straight men could do a lot worse than watch the sexy Carano kick ass with acrobatic aplomb; she’s not asked to employ much range, but this role will likely lead, at least, to a thriving career as athletic eye candy.

The fight scenes are simply and imaginatively choreographed, and they actually make sense from one edit to the next, something that can’t be said for a majority of fix-it-in-post actioners (the recently opened import Heir Apparent: Largo Winch comes to mind). And it ends on an ellipsis, following an essential rule of show business: Leave ‘em wanting more.

HAYWIRE. Director: Steven Soderbergh; Cast: Gina Carano, Channing Tatum, Ewan McGregor, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas; Distributor: Relativity Media; Rating: R; Opens: Friday at most theaters

If you have the impression that 2011 was a particularly good year for Palm Beach County’s professional theater, you are right.

Or at least you agree with the judges -- full disclosure: that includes myself -- of the Carbonell Awards, now in its 36th season of recognizing excellence in South Florida stage productions.

Of the 98 nominations announced on Monday, 43 came from Palm Beach County shows. (Miami-Dade accounted for 28 and Broward was a close third at 27 nominations. Of those 43, the Maltz Jupiter Theatre copped an impressive 25.

The north county playhouse not only earned more nominations than any other company, but its recent production of the musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat tied for the most nominations for a single show (9). Its stiffest competition for the awards may well come from the Maltz’s other popular and acclaimed musicals -- Crazy for You (8) and The Sound of Music (7).

Also well-positioned to receive some Carbonells is Palm Beach Dramaworks, which got eight nominations for its All My Sons, the inaugural production in its new Clematis Street home. It earned 10 nominations in all, with the other two coming for Beauty Queen of Leenane, the final production in its former theater.

The Caldwell Theatre’s six nominations were split between two productions -- Stuff (4) and Clybourne Park (2) -- which will be competing against each other for Best Production of a Play. Stuff is also up for Best New Work and Clybourne Park is in the running for Best Ensemble.

Bankrupt Florida Stage managed to receive two nominations, both for its final production ever, Carter W. Lewis’s The Cha-Cha of the Camel Spider, which will compete for Best New Work.

Beyond Palm Beach County, Actors’ Playhouse of Coral Gables walked off with 14 nominations, the second most of a single company. Seven of those came for its production of Hairspray, which failed to earn a slot in the Best Production of a Musical category. This marks the first time in many years that Actors’ Playhouse is not vying for the top musical award.

Similarly, Coral Gables’ GableStage did not land in the Best Production of a Play category for the first time in memory, even though its area premiere of Red was cited for director Joseph Adler and its two actors (Gregg Weiner, Ryan Didato).

The big nomination-getter in Broward County was Broward Stage Door, with 11 mentions, nine of them for its production of the musical Light in the Piazza. Also notable is the emergence of Promethean Theatre as a major competitor in the musical categories with its blood-drenched tuner, Song of the Living Dead. It has five nominations, including one for Best Production of a Musical.

In all, 13 professional companies received nominations, and 28 of the 68 eligible shows that opened during 2011 were recognized. The complete list of nominations for the 2012 Carbonells follows:

Best New Work

Brothers Beckett, David Michael Sirois, Alliance Theatre Lab

Captiva, Christopher Demos Brown, Zoetic Stage

The Cha-Cha of the Camel Spider, Carter W. Lewis, Florida Stage

Stuff, Michael McKeever, Caldwell Theatre Company

Best Production of a Play

All My Sons, Palm Beach Dramaworks

August: Osage County, Actors’ Playhouse

Clybourne Park, Caldwell Theatre Company

The Pillowman, Infinite Abyss

Stuff, Caldwell Theatre Company

Best Director of a Play

Joseph Adler, Red, GableStage

Jeffrey D. Holmes, The Pillowman, Infinite Abyss

J. Barry Lewis, All My Sons, Palm Beach Dramaworks

Stuart Meltzer, Captiva, Zoetic Stage

Richard Jay Simon, Side Effects, Mosaic Theatre

Best Actor in a Play

Ken Clement, Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol, Actors’ Playhouse

Scott Douglas Wilson, The Pillowman, Infinite Abyss

Avi Hoffman, Superior Donuts, GableStage

Kenneth Tigar, All My Sons, Palm Beach Dramaworks

Gregg Weiner, Red, GableStage

Best Actress in a Play

Kati Brazda, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Palm Beach Dramaworks

Elizabeth Dimon, All My Sons, Palm Beach Dramaworks

Annette Miller, August: Osage County, Actors’ Playhouse

Deborah Sherman, Side Effects, Mosaic Theatre

Laura Turnbull, August: Osage County, Actors’ Playhouse

Best Supporting Actor in a Play

Antonio Amadeo, The Cha-Cha of a Camel Spider, Florida Stage

Marckenson Charles, Superior Donuts, GableStage

Mark Della Ventura, Brothers Beckett, Alliance Theatre Lab

Ryan Didato, Red, GableStage

Todd Allen Durkin, Captiva, Zoetic Stage

Best Supporting Actress in a Play

Barbara Bradshaw, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Palm Beach Dramaworks

Renata Eastlick, Eclipsed, The Women’s Theatre Project

Elvire Emmanuelle, Eclipsed, The Women’s Theatre Project

Angie Radosh, Stuff, Caldwell Theatre Company

Laura Turnbull, Lombardi, Mosaic Theatre

Best Production of a Musical

Crazy for You, Maltz Jupiter Theatre

The Light in the Piazza, Broward Stage Door Theatre

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Maltz Jupiter Theatre

The Sound of Music, Maltz Jupiter Theatre

Song of the Living Dead, Promethean Theatre

Best Director, Musical

Michael Leeds, The Light in the Piazza, Broward Stage Door Theatre

Margaret M. Ledford, Song of the Living Dead, Promethean Theatre

Mark Martino, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Maltz Jupiter Theatre

Mark Martino, Crazy for You, Maltz Jupiter Theatre

Marc Robin, The Sound of Music, Maltz Jupiter Theatre

Best Actor in a Musical

Matt Loehr, Crazy for You, Maltz Jupiter Theatre

John Pinto, Jr., Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Maltz Jupiter Theatre

Michael Sharon , The Sound of Music, Maltz Jupiter Theatre

Dylan H. Thompson, The Light in the Piazza, Broward Stage Door Theatre

Best Actress in a Musical

Colleen Amaya, The Music Man, Broward Stage Door Theatre

Joline Mujica, Hairspray, Actors’ Playhouse

Vanessa Sonon, Crazy for You, Maltz Jupiter Theatre

Gabrielle Visser, The Light in the Piazza, Broward Stage Door Theatre

Catherine Walker, The Sound of Music, Maltz Jupiter Theatre

Best Supporting Actor in a Musical

Clay Cartland, Song of the Living Dead, Promethean Theatre

Michael Brian Dunn, Crazy for You, Maltz Jupiter Theatre

Avi Hoffman, Hairspray, Actors’ Playhouse

Bruce Rebold, The Light in the Piazza, Broward Stage Door Theatre

Ryan Williams, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Maltz Jupiter Theatre

Best Supporting Actress in a Musical

Julie Kleiner, Hairspray, Actors’ Playhouse

Avery Sommers, Hairspray, Actors’ Playhouse

Lara Hayhurst, The Light in the Piazza, Broward Stage Door Theatre

Natalie Ramirez, The Light in the Piazza, Broward Stage Door Theatre

April Woodall, The Sound of Music, Maltz Jupiter Theatre

Best Musical Direction

Helen Gregory, Crazy for You, Maltz Jupiter Theatre

Kim Douglas Steiner , Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Maltz Jupiter Theatre

Aaron McAllister, The Sound of Music, Maltz Jupiter Theatre

David Nagy, Hairspray, Actors’ Playhouse

Garrett Taylor, The Light in the Piazza, Broward Stage Door Theatre

Best Choreography

Chrissy Ardito, The Music Man, Broward Stage Door Theatre

Chrissy Ardito, Song of the Living Dead, Promethean Theatre

Barbara Flaten, Hairspray, Actors’ Playhouse

Mark Martino, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Maltz Jupiter Theatre

Shea Sullivan, Crazy for You, Maltz Jupiter Theatre

Best Scenic Design (Play or Musical)

Michael Amico, All My Sons, Palm BeachDramaworks

Tim Bennett, Stuff, Caldwell Theatre Company

Douglas Grinn, Lombardi, Mosaic Theatre

Sean McClelland, August: Osage County, Actors’ Playhouse

Michael Schweikardt, The Sound of Music, Maltz Jupiter Theatre

Best Lighting Design (Play or Musical)

Paul Black, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Maltz Jupiter Theatre

John Hall, All My Sons, Palm Beach Dramaworks

Andrew Myers, The Light in the Piazza, Broward Stage Door Theatre

Jeff Quinn, Red, GableStage

Patrick Tennent, Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol, Actors’ Playhouse

Best Costume Design (Play or Musical)

Brian O’Keefe, All My Sons, Palm Beach Dramaworks

Jose M. Rivera, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Maltz Jupiter Theatre

Ellis Tillman, Hairspray, Actors’ Playhouse

Ellis Tillman, In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play), GableStage

Ellis Tillman, Song of the Living Dead, Promethean Theatre

Best Sound Design (Play or Musical)

Victoria Deiorio, Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, Maltz Jupiter Theatre

Alexander Herrin, Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol, Actors’ Playhouse

Keith Kohrs, Crazy for You, Maltz Jupiter Theatre

Marty Mets, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Maltz Jupiter Theatre

Rich Szczublewski, All My Sons, Palm Beach Dramaworks

Best Ensemble

Brothers Beckett, Alliance Theatre Lab

The Brothers Size, GableStage

Clybourne Park, Caldwell Theatre Company

The Irish Curse, Mosaic Theatre

Masked, GableStage

The Fifth String Quartet of American composer Kenneth Fuchs, which had its world premiere Sunday afternoon at the Colony Hotel in Delray Beach, is an effective piece of dramatic music first and foremost, with a big-boned grandeur that shares sonic space with an intense and hearfelt elegy.

Fuchs, a professor of composition at the University of Connecticut, grew up in Fort Lauderdale and wrote the work at the behest of the Delray String Quartet, which gave the premiere and will play it again Friday night and Sunday afternoon. The composer said in remarks to an appreciative house last Sunday that the quartet, subtitled American, is a reflection on his country in the post 9-11 era.

Formally, the quartet is laid out in four movements, the outer two essentially in A major and the middle two in the neighborhood of D minor, all with traditional attributes such as sonata-allegro form, a scherzo and a double fugue. Its language is tonal, occasionally minimalist, and highly accessible, with a blue-skies feeling to much of it that derives from Fuchs’ extensive use of counterpoint and individual lines.

All of the material in the quartet is derived from the opening theme, a long-breathed, slow, Coplandesque canon that starts with the first violin and continues down to the cello. It’s one of those themes that promises a lot, and its derivations later in the quartet were clear to discern, again because the solo-line texture Fuchs sets up at the beginning accustoms the ear to single them out. The Delrays played this opening, which is marked for a very slow tempo, much too quickly to make the proper transitional effect from its stateliness to the exuberance of the rest of the movement. Nonetheless, it was pretty and evocative, and was played with an admirable level of commitment.

The first movement sets a difficult challenge for the foursome, dominated as it is by a bustling variation of the theme that requires an athletic bow and precise intonation at a high rate of speed. The effect is one of great optimism and energy, and exciting to hear. Each member attacked the assignment with gusto, building up a big cathedral of sound before the music darkened and set the stage for the scherzo.

The second movement, an agitated Shostakovich-style march, turns into a movement of almost constant motion, with long passages of pizzicati and fast-stepping motifs played in unison by all four members. Early on, the viola plays a dark-hued melody derived from the theme over a nervous pizzicato in the cello that ends up extending for pages; violist Richard Fleischman and cellist Claudio Jaffé played this beautifully, giving it a strong sense of dark energy. This is a powerful, propulsive movement, and it got a fine performance from the quartet.

The third, marked Elegia, again hints at Shostakovich by starting (after a minor-key version of the opening) with a sad-carousel waltz theme in the second violin’s upper registers that gets taken up by the whole ensemble and ultimately turns into an aggressive, sardonic version of itself before what may be the elegy itself appears toward the end of the movement. This section also received a fine performance, though the very first bars could have been a good bit slower, more mysterious, to make a clearer contrast with the second movement.

And the music of the movement is cut from much of the same cloth as the second, which also made the two middle movements sound almost like one continuous piece. Perhaps if the second movement were played more drily, the differences would stand out better. Also, the elegy at the end, which received an intensely emotional performance, could perhaps be a little longer, especially as the movement itself is designed to be the heart of the work.

The finale returns to the open-prairie feeling of the first, with a fugue subject as close to a fiddle breakdown as it could get, and when all four instruments took their turn at it, the effect was joyful and confident. The last movement doesn’t introduce much distinctive new material, but it serves as a welcome return to the cheerfulness of the first pages. This also provided the quartet’s members with a major workout, and they pulled it off admirably.

The Colony audience applauded the piece vociferously, and there is no doubt about its ability to engage listeners. Kenneth Fuchs has written a fine piece of music in this quartet, one that could conceivably fill the new-music inclinations of American string quartet concerts in an absorbing way. It also seems to me that the last two movements could be rescored for string orchestra (call it Elegy and Fugue) and make a most attractive contemporary piece for chamber orchestras.

The Delrays will record this quartet later this month for an all-Fuchs disc on Naxos, and one looks forward to hearing the piece again, as well as to celebrating the composer’s achievement and the progress made by this homegrown string foursome.

That said, the rest of the concert demonstrated where the Delray quartet has its most persistent weak spot, and that is in the core Germanic repertory of the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. This is a group much more successful with late Romanticism than the Classical period, and the first half of Sunday’s concert provided another example.

The first piece on the program was the Quartet No. 52 (in E-flat, Op. 64, No. 6) of Haydn, one of the composer’s late masterworks. Although the relatively rich opening was full and warm, the rest of the movement had a lot of rough playing. First violinist Mei Mei Luo’s triplets sounded labored rather than charming, and the quartet did nothing with the four-note back-and-forth extended passage except let the notes just sort of lie there. Further, the return of the opening material in a different, remote key needed much more color to make its impact.

The second movement was stronger, especially in the Sturm und Drang second section, but the third-movement Minuet sounded unsure on its feet, with a trio, again, that needed more contrast to stand out appropriately. The finale sounded much better-rehearsed than the first three movements, and it ended the piece with a good helping of Haydn’s celebrated wit.

Schubert’s Quartettsatz (in C minor, D. 703), which followed, also shortchanged the music somewhat, with the musicians playing cleanly and attractively, but not taking advantage of the subtler aspects of Schubert’s writing, such as the little key-shifting triplet motif that recurs throughout, and which cries out for some emphasis and shade.

The concert ended with a lush William Zinn arrangement of Bess, You Is My Woman Now, the duet from George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess. It was lush and lovely, but also could have used some more shape, perhaps most notably at the harmonic change that accompanies the bridge section beginning But I ain’t going.

The Delray String Quartet will repeat this program at 8 p.m. Friday night at All Saints Episcopal Church in Fort Lauderdale, and again at 4 p.m. Sunday at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Coconut Grove. Tickets are $20. Call 213-4138 or visit www.delraystringquartet.org.

***

The Boca Raton Symphonia entered the Saturday lists as part of its first-ever two-concert weekend, and opened it with the first hearing of a new work by the retired orchestra executive who helped found the group seven seasons ago.

Marshall Turkin, who turns 86 this year, began his professional career as an arranger for the U.S. Navy while stationed at the Panama Canal during World War II, and then pursued life as a composer and jazz musician in New York thereafter. Life intervened, as it often will, and Turkin, who went on to lead the Pittsburgh and Detroit symphony front offices, took a hiatus of more than 50 years from his composing before returning to the multi-staved paper in 2010.

Turkin’s Five Brief Essays on One Theme turned out to be a well-crafted, skillfully orchestrated work in a style congruent with the Americanists of the last mid-century, and for me evoked writers such as Norman Dello Joio, Paul Creston, and David Diamond. The theme, taken from a piano piece Turkin wrote in 1954, had an attractive, searching quality, and the composer did some interesting things with it. The third essay, A Dream, contained a warm, engaging trumpet solo, and the fourth, A Joke, is a swift, sparkling movement that showed off Turkin’s knowledge of orchestral resource as lines went rippling through the instrumental fabric.

Several things to note: One might have expected a man in his mid-80s to write a nostalgic, syrupy piece that would have gone straight to the psyches of the older members of his audience, but he pointedly avoided that, much to his credit. Second, the piece is a little too brief, especially A Joke, which is far too short, and has plenty of material that could easily be expanded.

The third is that Turkin’s position as the founding president of the group surely helped win him the spot on the program, but he has written a real piece of music here, one that might have seemed quite retro only 30 years ago but whose language is now in step with its time. He has written another piece for the Festival of the Arts Boca (the Boca Fest Overture, set for debut March 14), and a perusal of the score shows its speech to be along the same lines, and also well worth a listen.

The bottom line here is that while the Five Brief Essays could be said to come out of a late-life hobbyist impulse, this is not the music of an amateur. Turkin was trained in composition at Northwestern, and by the evidence here, he must have been a diligent student.

But the concert Saturday night at the Roberts Theater at St. Andrew’s School also stood out for another reason: the pianism of Alex Kobrin. After the Turkin piece, Kobrin took the stage for the Beethoven Fourth Concerto (in G, Op. 58). A Van Cliburn Competition gold medalist in 2005, the Russian-born pianist now teaches at Columbus State University in Georgia and concertizes around the world.

Kobrin played this great work with an exceptional level of polish, every phrase carefully considered and buffed to a high sheen, and at the same time, he was fully alive to the nobility of the concerto. This is not a concerto with obvious fireworks; it’s more of an exercise in delicacy, tone color and melodic beauty than showboating. That requires a pianist with a strong sense of this work’s special, fragile balance, and in Kobrin, the Boca Symphonia had it.

The famous piano-only opening of the concerto, so daring and different from the usual contemporary model, was a statement of surpassing gentleness and intimacy in Kobrin’s hands, and it marked much of the future dialogue with the orchestra. Guest director Arthur Fagen had a better version of the Symphonia to work with here than music director Philippe Entremont did in the first concert of the season, primarily in that Fagen had a far stronger complement of violins.

Kobrin unleashed impressive athletics in the explosive cadenza of the first movement, one of the few moments of straight-ahead virtuosity in the piece. In the question-answer dialogue of the second movement, Kobrin played with exceptional poise against the peremptory drama of the strings, and in the finale, he again demonstrated a level of control in which rhythms were crisp and exact and runs glittered and gleamed. A lovely performance by a very fine pianist, and which might have been improved only by a slightly more aggressive, vigorous approach in the finale.

To close the concert, Fagen led the Symphonia in the Symphony No. 3 (in A minor, Scottish) of Felix Mendelssohn. A repertory work, but one that gets far less frequent outings than its Italian-themed sibling, and it was good to hear it. The orchestra gave it a decent reading, too, with a bubbly second movement (nice clarinet work here by Michael Forte) and good ensemble work throughout.

And that was the primary accomplishment; with a better string section, this orchestra sounded much more impressive. Fagen, a fine conductor, sounds as though he did some good drill work with the sections, and the result overall was a satisfying and often exciting concert for the group’s second seasonal outing.