Give him a cigarette and a martini and the San Diego Chamber Orchestra’s affable, sunny faced artistic director, Donald Barra, might be Dean Martin perched up there on his four-legged stool, sharing some jokes with his adoring audience. Only this guy’s talking seriously about the concert we’re about to hear. About how it’s a program of “transitions”: from the elegant classicism of Mozart (when musicians were owned and didn’t talk back to their masters, as Mozart seems to in the movie, Amadeus); to the rebelliousness of Beethoven who rejected the very idea of masters; and ending up with the suave romanticism and technical mastery of Mendelssohn.

Barra has done this sort of thing for years, but there was a time when what would follow would be a somewhat less than remarkable, usually brave attempt by some poorly matched professional and semi-professional musicians to achieve artistic unanimity. Notably flawed intonation was usually the first thing one noticed. But those days appear to be gone. In a sort of acid test for a chamber orchestra -- a program featuring three classical masterpieces of the first order -- the SDCO acquitted itself nobly in accurate and reasonably polished performances. What problems they encountered were all givens: the peculiar acoustics of Sherwood Auditorium that invariably magnify the sounds of woodwind and brass instruments so that proper orchestral balances are extremely difficult to achieve; and the scaling down of some compositions that work much better with a full sized symphony orchestra.

In the latter category is Beethoven’s mighty Egmont Overture, something of a sonic spectacular in its larger manifestations, always ending in a brassy blaze of glory. In a chamber setting, balances go askew and the whole piece becomes transparent and weightless. Barra began with extreme caution, especially considering the super-charged musical drama involved, but his tempi were nicely judged thereafter, and what the sum total lacked in terms of weightiness was recouped in a certain exuberance. How those three (yes, a measly three) cellists sawed away for dear life in the conclusion!

Barra followed this up with a highly respectable reading of another work of genius, Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G Minor, K. 550. When David Atherton comes to town with similarly sized orchestral forces for the annual Mainly Mozart festival, he achieves far better results. Perhaps it’s Atherton’s special affinity with the composer. Barra’s reading of the first movement was leaden, not the clean and sparkling experience he had led us to expect in his opening remarks. Still, the dynamics were finely managed and the tempi very well judged all the way through to the last movement. The second movement andante perhaps slogged more than it danced, and stiffness reigned over spontaneity, but in the long run, solid determination and the inspired brilliance of the piece itself carried the day.

And then -- what! Yet another brilliant virtuoso Asian violinist? Afraid so. But this gal in her mid-20’s (they’re always young, too) is one of the best I’ve heard in some time. Her name is Livia Sohn, and she’s been here once before and is more than welcome to visit again. It’s no surprise to learn that at the age of 12 she won first place in the Yehudi Menuhin International Violin Competition. If Menuhin stood for anything, it was something far greater than mere virtuosity. You can have all the technique in the world but it doesn’t mean a damn thing without depth of feeling -- poetry and musicality. I think we’ll be hearing more of Ms. Sohn, and in the bad old days when the major record companies were still doing important things in the classical field, she would have had a contract already.

The piece she performed with the SDCO is, according to Barra, the greatest violin concerto in the world, and it’s difficult to argue with him, even after having heard it a trillion times. Of course, Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor is not really a chamber work, so some of the balances were extremely strange (occasionally the winds seemed to be tooting along with the soloist like something out of Looney-Tunes), but the orchestra’s sober professionalism, plus Barra’s well chosen tempi and apparent sensitively to dynamics, carried the day in showcasing a fine young artist.