Florida Grand Opera’s first-ever zarzuela production, of Federico Moreno Torroba’s Luisa Fernanda, is a handsome thing in many respects.

In a production that originated at Madrid’s Teatro Real, Emilio Sagi effectively uses a simple color scheme of white, black, orange and green, plus old-fashioned theater tricks (think hand shadows on the wall of your bedroom after lights out) as well as the clever use of scrims and a diorama at downstage right, to suggest a Spain in rebellion during the 1868 uprising that overthrew Queen Isabella II.

The chief singers are good as well, with Àngel Òdena’s Vidal particularly compelling, as was Davinia Rodriguez’s Duchess Carolina. And much of the audience was familiar with the operetta: I sat in two different places in the Ziff Ballet Opera House on Sunday afternoon, and each time I landed in the middle of a bunch of sing-along artists.

So it’s a much-loved piece, attractive to look at, and it provided a pleasant afternoon in the theater. Yet it was little more than that, and for a basic reason: Moreno Torroba’s score, which is pretty, sometimes catchy, and often charming, but all in all, painfully weak.

Of course, operetta tends to reflect national taste, and some things don’t translate well to foreign audiences. Arthur Sullivan is not Johann Strauss II, nor are either of them Dmitri Shostakovich, whose operetta Moskva, Cheryomushki is one of the Russian composer’s most extensive pieces. But even with all the untranslatable national peculiarities of their work, they were all creators with strong personalities, and their music makes an impact in spite of the hurdles.

That’s just not the case here. To take one example: In Act III, Luisa sings Callate, corazon, at the moment of her greatest emotional turmoil. The music starts promisingly in the minor, with a dark fragment of melody that suggests something of Falla-esque richness might follow, and none too soon. But no: Moreno Torroba touches on it, and then moves quickly into safer terrain. Here is precisely where a good composer would have broadened the drama and characters with compelling music, but Moreno Torroba simply doesn’t have the goods.

It could be argued that Luisa Fernanda, which premiered in 1932, is just a simple story of love, and deserves appropriately simple music. But this is a political story as well as an amorous story, and it has some presumption to depth that’s not easy to ignore, and that has to be reflected in the music.

This zarzuela, which actually has minimal dialogue, takes place in Madrid, where Luisa Fernanda is in love with the soldier Javier. But she also is being pursued by Vidal, a wealthy landowner. Javier is lured away temporarily by Duchess Carolina, and Vidal decides to join the anti-monarchists as an act of opposition. Javier is captured in battle, but saved by Luisa Fernanda, who nevertheless tells him that she doesn’t love him anymore.

Vidal prepares for his wedding to Luisa Fernanda, but when Javier comes to say farewell to her, she realizes that she still loves him. Vidal understands that Luisa Fernanda will never love him, so he releases Luisa Fernanda from her engagement so she can leave with Javier.

All the principals sang their roles ably. Amparo Navarro’s Luisa was believable and touching, and she has a big top of her register that bloomed attractively. As Javier, the tenor Antonio Gandía sang with a bright, spinto-ish sound that added urgency to his every entrance.

Òdena’s Vidal has some of the best music in the zarzuela, and his big, bronze voice was well-suited to this role. Rodriguez’s Carolina, though sometimes shrill in the highest reaches, nevertheless sang compellingly and brought distinction to a secondary, though not minor, part.

One of the best pieces in the zarzuela is the Act I habanera, Marchaba a ser soldado, which got a fine performance from tenor Daniel Shirley, whose upcoming FGO appearances as Prunier in La Rondine and Tybalt in Romeo et Juliette are now to be eagerly anticipated. Bass-baritone Miguel Sola sang with authority as Don Luis Nogales, but the tenor Martin Nusspaumer, as Saboyano, tended to swallow all his spoken lines, and speak them upstage rather than out to the audience.

The chorus members looked delicious in their all-white, Busby Berkeley-like attire in Act II’s Parasol Mazurka, and in their roles as idealized farmhands in Act III (the beautiful costumes throughout were by Pepa Ojanguren). Their singing was mostly good, but somewhat lacking in commitment, especially in the crowd outbursts, which sounded halfhearted rather than engaged. The orchestra, under Pablo Mielgo, was fine overall, but as with the chorus, there was an occasional looseness about details that made the music sound somewhat sloppy.

Indeed, there was a listlessness in general throughout the production, even amid some of the funnier bits of dialogue and big set pieces like the parasol song. Javier Ulaca’s stage direction seemed untethered to anything; the high dramatic points of Act II, such as the threat of a duel and the proposed mob lyching of the prisoner Javier, went by with almost no punctuation.

And frankly, I think the score again is primarily to blame. A really good piece of music sweeps everyone into it, and drives better performances from one and all, chorus members to lead roles. But a dud, like this one, does the opposite.

It was a good idea for FGO to explore the world of the zarzuela, and perhaps there are other works in the genre that could make more of an impact. At the very least, the company can say it paid due homage to an authentic and cherished Spanish tradition, and that’s to be applauded. But what it really needed was much better music.

Luisa Fernanda will be performed at 8 tonight and Saturday at the Ziff Ballet Opera House in Miami, and at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 1, and 8 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 3, at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts in Fort Lauderdale. For tickets, call 800-741-1010 or visit www.fgo.org.

In its concert this past weekend of J.S. Bach and holiday music, the Master Chorale of South Florida both continued in its traditions and explored a newer path that may pay bigger dividends for the group in the future.

In its first appearance under its new director, Karen Kennedy, the chorale offered up a seasonal program that began with J.S. Bach’s Magnificat (BWV 243), accompanied by four soloists and members of the Miami Symphony Orchestra. At the Wold Center for the Performing Arts at Lynn University on Saturday night, the chorale sounded strong and well-drilled.

Kennedy opened the Magnificat with the proper Bachian briskness, and suddenly it was all trumpets and praise, a classic sound of the holidays. The chorale has 90 people, an unusually large complement for the Magnificat, but I enjoyed hearing it in XXL, and Bach, who famously complained about the inadequacy of the forces he had in Leipzig, would surely have liked it, too.

The chorus sounded good in the Bach, handling its flowery melismas ably, and it also sounded well-balanced, with a sturdy tenor complement more than holding its own, especially in the Fecit potentiam. Entrances were pretty good considering the size of the group (the Omnes generationes was slightly shaky at the very outset), and when the chorus sang, it commanded.

The soloists demonstrated good Baroque chops; mezzo Misty Bermudez is a regular member of Seraphic Fire, and tenor Tony Boutté is the founder of Arcanum, a Miami-based Baroque-music ensemble. Soprano Ah Young Hong had the warmest, biggest voice of the four, offering a very nice Quia respexit humiltatem. Bermudez and Boutté blended well on Et misericordia, their lightly colored instruments matching admirably, and both sang their solo pieces (Deposuit and Esurientes, respectively) capably.

Bass David Newman has a strong if not especially resonant voice, but he could have done with some more help from the continuo on Quia fecit mihi magna, which was played here with almost no -- well, continuo; all I could hear was the bare notes of the cello and bass. One hopes there was a technical issue with the volume on Matt Steynor’s organ rather than that this no-mayo accompaniment was intentional.

The accompaniment in general from the Miami Symphony was fine, with impressive work from concertmaster Daniel Andai and principal cellist Aron Zelkowicz in the Deposuit. Woodwind work was also good in the various solos, and the only real blotch on this sturdy performance of this work was the ending of Suscepit Israel, in which Hong and Bermudez were joined by mezzo Jamie Cartright; the final measures went sharply awry, and the threesome’s arrival at a consonant B major chord at the end came as a relief.

The second half turned to smaller works, including two Hanukkah tunes, Mi Y’Maleil and S’Yivon, in charming arrangements by Joseph Flummerfelt. The a cappella singing was pleasant, though the pitch went south en masse in the second half of Mi Y’Maleil. The Jewish holiday songs were preceded by the Miami Symphony strings in the Christmas Concerto (Op. 6, No. 8) of Arcangelo Corelli, which got better as it went along, ending very sweetly in the famous closing Pastorale; associate conductor Jeffrey Stern led the Corelli and the Hanukkah selections.

Kennedy returned for a medley of three carols specially arranged, on a very short deadline, for the choir by Alexander Schumacker, a graduate student of Kennedy’s at the University of Miami. He has done quite a good job, especially in bringing distinctive colors to each of the carols: Gustav Holst’s In the Bleak Midwinter, followed by the Czech traditional carol Rocking, and ending with the Spanish carol Riu, Riu Chiu.

For Rocking, Schumacker devised a gentle, two-beat open texture that directed the attention to the melody, and for Riu, Riu Chiu, he added some very effective orchestration that made the carol stand out from the rest. Had he more time, he might have resisted the Respighian trills in Rocking, and perhaps rethought the loud dynamics of the last verse of the Holst; it seems counter to the terribly intimate sentiment of Christina Rossetti’s poem.

The chorus closed with a good but somewhat imprecise reading of Eric Whitacre’s Lux aurumque, a piece that shimmers alluringly yet still needs to spot-on to work correctly, and James Bassi’s Carol Symphony, a canny three-movement work that uses the Ukrainian Carol of the Bells, the Irish Wexford Carol, and the English carol Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day. This is a very skillful piece, and chorus and orchestra, plus Bermudez in the Wexford Carol, brought it forth with spirit and life.

The audience at the Wold Center was not very large, though it was supportive, for this opening concert of the chorale’s ninth season. It was a smart move for the Fort Lauderdale-based chorus to collaborate with Lynn and the Miami Symphony to beef up resources and add venues, and chorale officials say the group’s in good financial shape and looking forward to its now-annual Valentine’s Day appearance with poperatic tenor Andrea Bocelli.

But the chorus now stands at an important junction. It has always presented programs that would be typical of choruses attached to orchestras, as it used to be to the Florida Philharmonic. That has led to some programs (such as Haydn’s Creation) in which the main focus was on soloists and orchestra, not the chorus.

It seems to me that what the Master Chorale needs to do now is develop a sense of itself as a real chorus, a group that sings the bulk of the choral literature rather than major orchestral works that also include massed voices. It might be better off, say, doing five concerts a year, with one or two of them in the mold of the Magnificat or some other big work. The other three, though, could be choral concerts, featuring masterpieces from Renaissance to contemporary times, perhaps with smaller units of the chorus broken off for other pieces during those concerts.

It may be time, in other words, for this fine ensemble, which has a uniquely devoted membership, to move away from being a chorus without orchestral portfolio and more toward a chorus whose identity is its own, and not ancillary to a large assembly of instrumental musicians. That would make things more interesting for singers and audiences alike, and open up whole new stretches of the repertoire for the Master Chorale to investigate.

The days when your basic high-end party for the swells featured fresh music by a talented local composer are long gone, but the music itself lives, and in a good performance, can go some way toward reviving a lost era of graceful living.

The Firebird Chamber Orchestra’s current program of serenades does just that, with refreshingly buoyant and engaging performances of early works by Mozart and Mendelssohn, and the much-beloved Serenade for Strings of Tchaikovsky.

Director Patrick Dupré Quigley, leading his Seraphic Fire side project in concert Thursday night at St. Gregory’s Episcopal in Boca Raton, didn’t bring anything particularly new to the music from an interpretive point of view, but his programming of the two prentice works showed again that his enthusiasm for worthy rarities remains undiminished.

This version of the Firebird orchestra featured 14 players from various parts of the country, all except the cellos standing, and rearranging themselves smoothly for the different works. These are expert performers, and aside from out-of-tune octaves in the violins during the Mozart, they played with accuracy, style and polish. Something about the austerity of the presentation made it that much more effective; those ostensibly small forces made a lot of big music.

Thursday’s concert opened with an early divertimento (in D, K. 136) by Mozart, probably written in Milan in late 1771 or Salzburg early in 1772. This is sunny, delicious music, full of high spirits and charming invention, and in the third movement, even a hint of fugue.

The first movement was crisp and fast, with on-point scales rocketing back and forth, and a nice change of mood just before the recap as second violins played their accompaniment figures with a hushed, mysterious murmur. Fast figures didn’t mean a thin texture, though, and the warmth of the sound the Firebird was able to supply in the elegant second movement was gratifying.

If the first six soft-footstep chords were not quite together at the start of the finale, the rest of the movement chattered along nicely, and the musicians observed a fine sense of balance. Also worth noting throughout was a scrupulous attention to dynamics, which added color and variety to the divertimento.

Next came the eighth (in D, MWV N 8) of Felix Mendelsson’s dozen string sinfonias, written at the end of 1822 when the composer was only 13. It’s more substantial music than the Mozart, and offered the Firebird an abundance of interesting elements to work with.

The unison octaves that dominate the language of the introduction to the first movement were right on the money, and set up the rest of the music in suitably dramatic fashion. The Allegro that followed had a great sense of frothiness and tension, with a sparkling main theme sharing sonic space with chromatic scales rising snakily out of the bottom of the texture.

The second-movement Adagio is scored for violas and bass alone, and the three violas here – Doyle Armbrust, Dominic Johnson and Erik Rynearson – played this dark, Bach-influenced movement with tenderness and delicacy. The orchestra offered strongly accented playing in the third-movement Minuet, and in the Trio again put dynamics to the fore, alternating softs and louds back and forth in a very entertaining manner.

The finale, which owes so much to Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, had plenty of energy, though the opening theme could have stood out more on its first entrance. There were again some slightly sour octaves in the violins from time to time, but overall, this was a performance full of vigor and youth, and it raised the idea of a Firebird Chamber Orchestra recording of the Mendelssohn string symphonies.

The third and final work on the program was the Tchaikovsky Serenade (in C, Op. 48), which often is heard with a much larger complement of strings. But the Firebird was plenty large enough to give a rousing reading of this thrice-familiar piece, and it went well with Tchaikovsky’s neoclassical inclinations, sympathies that bring this work close to the world of the Mozart divertimento.

As always, Quigley favored the get-on-with-it tempo, and he kept the high emotion of the opening theme fully present. He also gave plenty of rein to the Italianisms present in this part of the Serenade (Tchaikovsky loved traveling in Italy), and the orchestra made them rich and pretty.

The waltz second movement was firmly dance-like, not idealized, so much so that in the middle the effect was almost salon-like, with heavy beats and a broad indulgence in Tchaikovsky’s alluring tune. The Elegy that followed was quite beautiful, especially when the cellos entered with their reading of the impassioned main theme.

The finale began a little too amorphously, and could have used a clearer explication of the rhythms. But the rest of the piece was played marvelously well, with excitement to burn as the Russian folk tune around which the movement is built raced to its headlong conclusion.

The Firebird Chamber Orchestra clearly has a warm bond with its conductor and founder, and there is something wonderfully committed and engaged about its performances. This is a collection of musicians that is having a terrific time on stage, and its joy in music-making is infectious.

The Firebird Chamber Orchestra performs this program at 8 tonight at All Saints Episcopal Church in Fort Lauderdale, and at 4 p.m. Sunday at Miami Beach Community Church in Miami Beach. Tickets are $35; call 305-285-9060 or visit www.seraphicfire.org.

Leaving a place where your colleagues in academia went boogie-boarding in the Pacific Ocean every Friday morning can’t be an easy thing to do.

And so it was for Karen Kennedy, who left her job at the University of Hawaii-Manoa and directorship of the Honolulu Symphony Chorus to come back to the mainland, first to Baltimore, and then to Miami.

“It was very hard for me to leave. It was like a spiritual connection to that island,” Kennedy said. “And I had a fantasy that living in South Florida would be like that, with the palm trees and stuff.”

Not so much.

“Different pace,” she said. “I’m adapting.”

Tonight, Kennedy makes her first appearance as conductor of the Master Chorale of South Florida in a holiday-themed concert accompanied by members of the Miami Symphony Orchestra. The 90-member chorus will tackle seasonal pieces such as James Bassi’s Carol Symphony and a medley of holiday songs, as well as Eric Whitacre’s Lux aurumque. Also, the orchestra will play Corelli’s Christmas Concerto.

But the big piece on the program will be the Magnificat of J.S. Bach (BWV 243). A joyous but difficult work, it’s also usually done with smaller forces than the Fort Lauderdale-based Master Chorale normally summons. Kennedy said it’s important for the singers to learn the correct approach for the music, whose contrapuntal textures are, she said, like “weaving lace.”

“The thing that’s hard for professionals is, ‘We’re going to do Bach with 90 people? He wouldn’t have done it with 90 people. Bach’s choir was so small,’” she said, her voice feigning musicological outrage. “Well, yeah. But how else is this group going to experience this? …. We’re going to do it the best we can with a huge herd, and we’re going to have to lighten up. We can’t sing this like it’s Verdi.

“So they’re learning how to be a 90-voice Bach choir,” she said. “Not an easy task.”

The soloists for the Magnificat will be soprano Ah Hong, mezzo-soprano Misty Bermudez, tenor Tony Boutté, and baritone David Newman.

Kennedy, 41, who hails from Rochester, N.Y., was always interested in being a musician, and like many young pianists with some ability, she found herself conducting from time to time while doing musical theater and other such activities.

“Having an instrument that’s alive is a whole different ballgame,” she said.

But it wasn’t until she saw a choir director working at an all-state competition in her high school that she started to think about conducting.

“That was the first time I thought that could be something I want to do,” Kennedy said. “I didn’t even know that could be a job. I thought, ‘That’s a job? I want that to be my job.’”

She earned her bachelor’s at DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind., then her master’s at nearby Butler University, and began teaching high school. When her parents moved to Arizona, she followed them, and ended up in a doctoral program at Arizona State University, where she was encouraged to become a professional choral conductor.

Armed with her doctorate, she won the job in Hawaii, where she worked for six years. In 2006, she became the director of choral activities at Towson University in Baltimore, where she led four different choirs. She was appointed director of the Master Chorale in May after the departure of Joshua Habermann, a good friend of Kennedy’s, who now leads the Dallas Symphony Chorus.

“It’s all been this incredible, wonderful cosmic accident. And I’m so grateful. It’s better than I would have planned,” she said. “I never thought I would be running a doctoral program in Miami. But it’s absolutely the right thing.”

In person, Kennedy is vibrant, engaging and warm, one of those leaders whose strength lies partly in her charm, which masks her formidable knowledge of the repertoire and her long experience. She inspires devotion and loyalty in the singers she’s led, as evidenced by a fan page on Facebook called I Want to Be Dr. Karen Kennedy When I Grow Up.

“She is funny, kind, and when you go on stage you’re prepared,” one of her singers in Hawaii wrote this month. “O’ahu nearly sank into the Pacific when she left.”

Kennedy is married to a fellow musician, Corin Overland, who has just completed a Ph.D. in conducting at Temple University and hopes to soon join his wife in Miami. “I text him a picture of a palm tree everyday,” she said.

Under its previous leaders, Jo-Michael Scheibe and Habermann, the chorus performed many of the box-office biggies of the choral world, including the Mozart Requiem and the C minor Mass, the Requiems of Brahms, Faure and Verdi, Haydn’s Creation, Mendlessohn’s Elijah and Orff’s Carmina Burana. It also has sung backup twice to the Italian popera tenor Andrea Bocelli.

While some of the decisions, including the programming of the Magnificat, were in place when Kennedy took over, she said this year she’s having the chorus do a wider variety of small works, such as the Whitacre, a composer the chorus was eager to perform.

“This is a departure for them. And then in the spring, for the program they did have in place, they said, ‘What if we did stick with the smaller works? What would you do?’” Kennedy said.

The result was a program called Royal Flush, featuring music by and for royalty. The April 20-22 concerts will feature the Coronation Mass of Mozart (in C, K. 317); choral pieces from Britten’s Gloriana, an opera written for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II; and John Rutter’s This Is the Day, composed earlier this year for the wedding of the queen’s grandson, William the Duke of Cambridge.

In addition, there will be two of the Coronation Anthems by Handel (written for the coronation of King George II), and songs by King Henry VIII and the Hawaiian Queen Lili’uokalani.

“Next year we’re going to go back to the big works. But this is a transition year, and this is stuff they’ve never sung. And it’s good pedagogically to sing this stuff … We have a lot of different colors to work with,” she said.

Kennedy has big plans for the chorale. She’s thinking about programming Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms for the 2013-14 season, and she’d like to pursue a fund-raising campaign to send the chorus on a European tour.

“I would love us to travel. I think it would be amazing to take this group somewhere huge,” she said, adding that she took one of her Hawaiian choirs to Carnegie Hall. “I would love this group to be able to go somewhere and do this music in the cathedrals of Europe.”

That would be fitting, she said, for a group with such strong support from its members. Originally the chorus of the Florida Philharmonic, its singers insisted on keeping the group going after the orchestra failed in 2003.

Kennedy said the Master Chorale is an assembly of people who are there for the love of the art form, and participating in the music often serves as a welcome respite from difficult careers.

“They’re music teachers and lawyers and doctors, and they have this one night a week where they come together and do this. And so many of them have said, ‘This is so important to me. This allows me to do my day job. This is the reason I can do what I do during the day,’” she said.

“I just got a little card from a lady the other night, and she said, ‘You know, I take care of very sick people all day. This allows me to do that.’ It’s so important, and you forget that sometimes when you’re a professional musician.”

***

The Master Chorale of South Florida and the Miami Symphony perform Bach to the Holidays at 8 tonight at the Second Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, at 8 p.m. Saturday in the Wold Performing Arts Center at Lynn University in Boca Raton, and at 4 p.m. Sunday at the First United Methodist Church of Coral Gables. Tickets are $30 in advance and $35 at the door. Call 954-418-6232 or visit www.masterchoraleofsouthflorida.org.

New Music Festival: Thomas McKinley (Nov. 10, Lynn University)

For six years now, Lynn University’s Lisa Leonard has been running a weeklong fall-season festival devoted to new music and to the work of a featured composer.

Past composers have included Gunther Schuller and Kenneth Frazelle, but this year, Leonard stayed close to home by choosing Thomas McKinley, a Lynn composition professor who also serves as undergraduate adviser at the Conservatory of Music and as curriculum coordinator. The conservatory presented an evening devoted to McKinley’s music Thursday.

McKinley is a skilled and serious-minded composer, and judging by Thursday’s concert, one with a fondness for slow, deliberate openings out of which bigger structures evolve, for meditative moods, and for evocative cadenza-style lines for solo instruments. Seven works were on the program, dating from the late 1970s to today, including a world premiere of a work for clarinet and piano trio.

McKinley was helped in all of this by a fine collection of young performers, particularly Jesse Yukimura, whose dark-honey viola sound in McKinley’s 1996 Elegy to the Spanish Republic gave the music a strong sense of mourning, and flutist Jo Brand, who in Trialogue (1979) handled passages of rapid notes, flutter tonguing and big leaps with agility and sizable tone.

Pianist Anastasiya Timofeeva demonstrated power and strong technique in three knotty, sometimes fierce Fantasy Pieces for solo piano McKinley composed from 2004 to 2006, and flutist Fabian Alvarez gave McKinley’s Nocturne (1988) a fat, round sound, and plenty of space for its long lines to breathe; the able pianist was Agnieszka Sornek.

In the Fantasy (1981) for woodwind quintet, hornist Raul Rodriguez had the central role, dominating much of the musical discussion, and indeed bringing it to an abrupt halt as the other four instruments (flutist Alvarez, oboist Greg Stead, clarinetist Fabiola Porras, and bassoonist Noemi Rivera) built their “chatter” to a point of maximum notes. The world premiere work, Double Visions, was part new, part old, with a fresh first movement and a reworked second movement that McKinley said was derived from a 1989 seminar he took with British composer Peter Maxwell Davies.

The work was so named because the composer noticed similarities between the old and new parts, and there was much of McKinley’s basic approach here, with substantial solo spotlights amid the ensemble texture; the new movement’s language was more uncompromising, more savage, than the second. Each of the players – pianist Dan Yi, clarinetist Michael Kaiser, cellist Elis Ramos and violinist Delcho Tenev – showed good chops and gratifying attention to the music.

For the most part, McKinley’s music on this program was sober, moderately paced, and enamored of dramatic solo moments in which he is moved to say something important. But it was the earliest piece on the program, a Piano Trio from 1978, that offered the greatest enjoyment. This was a three-in-one-movement piece with real snap and memorable motifs, though not in any way Romantically tonal.

The middle of the final movement has a swingy, motoric rhythmic pattern in which the piano (Aneliya Novikova) bubbles along in kookily pointillist patterns, adding a welcome sense of energy and humor. Violinist Ann Fontanella and cellist Jared Cooper joined Novikova in clearly having great fun playing this attractive, muscular little work; it would have been nice to hear other McKinley compositions with the same kind of joyful spirit.

***

Ian Maksin (Arts Garage, Nov. 5)

Russian-born cellist Ian Maksin is well-suited for today’s multi-tasking, self-marketing, youth-oriented age of classical music. The former cellist for the Delray String Quartet, he now operates a solo career from Chicago, where he has made important contacts with area instrumentalists and composers and released his own disc of solo cello pieces.

Maksin came to the Arts Garage in Delray Beach on Nov. 5 for an unusual program that saw him switch at the end from cello to guitar and accompany himself in a series of Russian and French songs from the worlds of theater and pop. But in the first part of his recital, he offered new and little-known music, as well as a piece of his own based on songs by Sting.

Freshly composed were the first two pieces of a trilogy (Three Pieces) by the Chicago-based Ilya Levinson. The third piece hasn’t been completed, but the first two show Levinson to be interested in the sounds of the present and transmuting them in his own way. The first, Rockin’, describes the sound of Levinson’s next-door neighbor practicing his guitar, and so the music is appropriately rhythmic and repetitive, though it works on its own without the extramusical association.

The second, In Blue, had a warmly lyric style and some gentle swing eighths, and made a very attractive counterpart to the first piece. Here, too, this was music that evoked a sense of something overheard, but in a more nostalgic vein. If the third piece is as cannily constructed, this work will make a very good contemporary addition to solo cello recitals.

Maksin also made the case for the Sonata No. 1 of Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-1996), the Soviet composer and friend of Shostakovich. Like the work of his more famous contemporary, this is often bleak, emotionally anguished music, beginning in the opening Adagio with a somber, bluesy riff that returns to bring the movement’s long, passionate line back to earth.

The second movement (Allegretto) sounds a good deal like Shostakovich, at least at first, with its dark, slightly off-center waltz tune main theme, followed by effective pizzicato passages and some tireless grinding energy in the lower registers. The finale was even more like Shostakovich in the near-hysterical keening passages that followed some stern chord hammerblows; Maksin played this movement with tremendous force, making the contrast with the preceding Allegretto very stark.

This was fascinating music, and Maksin could make more of it with a somewhat more restrained touch here and there, smoothing out some of the rough edges.

Maksin’s own Meditation on Themes by Sting wraps two of the British songwriter’s post-Police tunes into a moody, pretty piece, taking slightly more astringent harmonies to Fragile and Fields of Gold. Maksin doesn’t rework the music as much as simply play sections of each song in an idiomatic matter, but he has a good idea here, and it should remain a popular encore for him.

Maksin also played a somewhat over-forceful version of the Bach Cello Suite No. 3 (in C, BWV 1009), as well as of the Suite by Gaspar Cassado. He’s a very strong player, with a big personality that comes across when he performs, but he could benefit by broadening his approach and making a virtue of subtlety, particularly in the Bach. That said, his technique was impressive, if not spotless; it’d be instructive to hear him do all the Bach suites and hear him navigate all of their variety.

The concert closed with Maksin on guitar, singing in a high, reedy voice that was well-suited for Serge Gainsbourg-style chansoneering. He sang two songs by Alexander Vertinsky (including Let’s Say Goodbye); two by the contemporary Russian pop songwriter Boris Grebenshikov (including the pretty, Cat Stevens-like Silver of My Lord); and Les une contre des autres, from Michel Berger’s score for the Broadway show Starmania, among others. He sang and played well, and has the right light romantic touch for this kind of material.

An interesting program, and a good example of the kind of versatility that should suit him admirably for different kinds of audiences. He is a musician well worth watching, and also a persuasive advocate for new music.