SPHINX CHAMBER ORCHESTRA

SPHINX CHAMBER ORCHESTRA

Carnegie Hall

The concert at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday evening offered typical fare: a string chamber orchestra playing works by Mozart, Villa-Lobos and others. But the audience, far from the typical classical music crowd, was overwhelmingly black and Latino, and most were children. Onstage as well, all the players were young black and Latino musicians. It was a sight you rarely encounter at Carnegie Hall.

The gala concert, presented by J PMorgan Chase, was a celebration of Sphinx, a national nonprofit arts organization dedicated to improving the participation of blacks and Latinos in music schools, as professional classical musicians and in classical music audiences. Speaking toward the end of the program, Aaron P. Dworkin, the founding president of the 10-year-old Sphinx Organization, said that although minorities have made enormous breakthroughs in a wide range of fields, the number of black and Latino musicians in professional American orchestras remains at approximately 1.5 percent for each group.

In addition, Sphinx runs a successful competition for string players, also supported by J PMorgan Chase. Every member of the 20-piece Sphinx Chamber Orchestra that performed on this occasion, as well as each impressive soloist, was a past or current prizewinner.

To open the program, the conductor Anthony Elliot led a nimble account of an Allegro movement from Mozart’s Divertimento in B flat. Evidence that just a genial Mozart work can entice new listeners through an engaging live performance was offered by two young people seated next to me. Before the concert began, they squirmed in their seats, arm-wrestled and looked terribly restless. But once the music started, they sat literally on the edges of their seats and listened.

Next was Gareth Johnson, a 21-year-old violinist from Florida, who played a solo work, “Louisiana Blues Strut (A Cakewalk),” by the American composer Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, who died in 2004. Though the piece is steeped in blues, the music is run through with Bartokian wails, cluster chords and obsessive riffs. The lanky Mr. Johnson, who exudes charisma (and knows it), played it to the hilt.

Also excellent was a virtuosic rendition of Eugène Ysaÿe’s rhapsodic Sonata No. 6 for Violin solo by Tai Murray, a superb player who is a member this season of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center II ensemble. The violinist Ilmar Gavilan and the violist Juan-Miguel Hernandez from the Harlem Quartet, an ensemble of Sphinx prizewinners, gave a commanding account of a Handel passacaglia, arranged by Johan Halvorsen.

They were then joined by the other members of their quartet (the violinist Melissa White and the cellist Desmond Neysmith) for an exciting account of two movements from Wynton Marsalis’s episodic and stylistically eclectic string quartet “At the Octoroon Balls.”

After the presentation of Sphinx’s Lifetime Achievement Award to the violinist W. Sanford Allen, who was the first black member of the New York Philharmonic (1962-77), the program ended with Mr. Elliot conducting the orchestra and three violin soloists (Elena Urioste, Maia Cabeza and Ms. White) in a fleet and incisive performance of an Allegro from a Vivaldi concerto.

After the ovations, as the orchestra members began walking to the wings, excited audience members rushed up to the stage to shake their hands — another sight you don’t see often at Carnegie Hall. ANTHONY TOMMASINI

BEN HEPPNER