Climate, culture, commerce: That was the formula laid out Thursday by New Jersey state arts council spokesman David Miller in his preface to the concert by the Cape May Festival Orchestra. Miller called the festival a model of what can happen when a resort community adds the arts to its traditional mix of sun and beachfront games.

The concert, coming midway in a season that begins in late May and runs through June 29, brought around 250 vacationers into Cape May’s Convention Hall to sit on folding chairs to hear music by Stravinsky, Beethoven and Mendelssohn. Artistic director Stephen Rogers Radcliffe noted that the eight-year-old festival was designed as a boost to the “shoulder season,” the early beach weeks before sun and water temperature guarantee full hotels.
Radcliffe’s musical forces are built around his New York Chamber Ensemble, which performs as an entity and whose players function as principals amid the young professionals who fill out the festival orchestra.

In the course of the festival’s history, a stage shell has been installed and some reflecting panels placed in the ceiling in an effort to focus the acoustics. More panels would help, but the hall was not designed as a musical setting, and Radcliffe sees adapting to the hall as one of the experiences helpful to his young players.

His program balanced popular favorites — Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 and Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto — with Stravinsky’s tangy Dances Concertantes. He guided the orchestra through Stravinsky’s laconic metric scheme with admirable poise. The performance preserved the irony of this gloss on conventional ballet writing while solo players injected dots of sound and theatrical melodic fragments. The winds and brass have an advantage in this hall, but in Stravinsky, their prominence was both welcome and vital.

Violinist Corey Cerovsek was soloist in Mendelssohn’s concerto. Steering clear of the staginess that has become a kind of norm with this piece, Cerovsek put his considerable virtuosity to musical ends. He shaded phrases, touched lightly some of the sweeps — like those opening the final movement — and found delicacy in writing that often sounds like shouting. The inner colors in his playing of the middle movement drew similar playing from the orchestra in this fresh reading.

Audience response led Cerovsek to play a Kreisler nugget in which virtuosity again was bent to the task of mining the musical depth of the piece.

After all that, the Beethoven symphony, played by an ensemble similar in size to those of Beethoven’s time, sounded young, alert and a little brash.

Cape May Music Festival
Stephen Rogers Radcliffe conducts various programs in the festival, at Convention Hall, Cape May, through June 29. Information: 609-884-5404.