Luring the San Diego Symphony audience into Copley Hall with a program devoted to new music is as likely as getting children to the dinner table with a promise of fried liver and Brussels sprouts. On Friday’s (Dec. 2) concert, Symphony Music Director Jahja Ling was savvy enough to give his patrons a Happy Meal of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” featuring the popular American violin virtuoso Robert McDuffie.

Opening with this audience favorite proved wise programming, because McDuffie was nothing less than brilliant in the four solo concertos that comprise Vivaldi’s ubiquitous opus. He had everything: a powerful, driving sound that carried well in a room notoriously unfriendly to the solo violin; immaculate precision in the furious figuration of the fast movements, and a floating, polished line in the more tranquil sections. His energy and communication never flagged, nor did his finesse of phrasing and articulation.

His stylistic concepts merged precisely with Ling’s, and the aptly pared down orchestra (30 strings plus harpsichord) gave as clean and unified account of 18^th century Italian instrumental style as I have heard this orchestra give. Titles on the overhead screen provided the pictorial cues that Vivaldi (or his publisher) included in the score, e.g. “lightning before a summer storm” and “the chattering cold of winter.”

After this quite tenable listener-friendly opening, Ling brought McDuffie back for the Philip Glass 2009 “Violin Concerto No. 2: American Four Seasons,” a work written expressly for McDuffie and one that intentionally parallels the Vivaldi“Four Seasons” in length and instrumentation, but not at all in style. With the audience in near total contentment after the Vivaldi, Ling’s psychology worked: the Copley Hall audience not only ate their vegetables with relish, but applauded fervently for a second helping.

Not that Philip Glass is cutting edge music at this stage of the game, of course, but his trademarked, refined minimalism is not everyone’s cup of tea. Those oscillating arpeggios that function so tellingly in a film score often become turgid in the visually neutral setting of a concert hall. I thought this four-movement violin concerto worked well because of the contrasting solo violin segments Glass used to separate each movement and commence the work.

How satisfying to hear McDuffie linger over the composer’s Bachian counterpoint or execute delicious double-stop themes in these solo interludes, whose stylistic variety certainly underscored that Glass can spin out a plenitude of ideas beyond mere triadic repetition. McDuffie has lived with this composition and persuasively projected its strengths. Although in a program note the composer purposely declined to attach specific seasonal labels (a la Vivaldi) to the concerto’s movements, I thought I recognized a serene, Sibelius-like winterscape in the second movement.

Other movements brandished the dense motoric iterations and passionate layering that thrill Glass fans and exasperate his detractors. Parallel to the harpsichord’s role in the Vivaldi concertos, Glass provides a prominent electronic keyboard part for his Violin Concerto, executed with assurance and vivacity by symphony pianist Mary Barranger.

Perhaps feeling a bit of guilt for ignoring the majority of the orchestra—the rest of the strings, as well as all the woodwinds, brass and percussion—Ling brought everyone back for a final offering, two sections of Alexander Glazunov’s grand ballet score “The Seasons,” Op. 67. Glazunov’s sumptuous orchestration of throbbing, arched melodic themes and the accompanying lush, Romantic harmonies sent much of audience away humming blissfully. I was not among them.