The Pierian almost always plays ambitions programs, but tonight's is head and shoulders over their Cambridge concerts of recent years. The large Radcliffe string contingent is partly responsible as, of course, is "Mal" Holmes' energy and enthusiasm, but the honors of the evening go to two talented Freshmen who tackle mature concert concerti very rarely attempted by amateurs.

Chief item on the menu is Mozart's wonderful D minor concerto for piano. Noel Lee '46 is the soloist and, for one of his age, plays with astonishing force and clarity. Last night's rehearsal showed that both he and the orchestra had worked hard to get a unified performance, and the result, at least, in the piano part, is up to professional standards. The fact that Lee is here at Harvard and not in a conservatory or on the concert stage, is our good luck. If that sounds like exaggeration, go to the concert tonight.

Robert Miller '46 will play a cello concerto by Johann Braun, a violinist virtuoso and contemporary of Mozart. The music shares the common failing of virtuoso-composed concerti, a lack of organic give and take between solo instrument and orchestra, but it is very pleasant to listen to. For the most part, Miller plays like a veteran, and when a Freshman undertakes to play what an 18th century virtuoso wrote to display his own technique, it would be foolish to cavil at small lapses of pitch or phrasing.

Not content with the aforementioned two chestnuts, "Mal" Holmes has thrown in a Sinfonia by Rosetti, and Bach's suite for orchestra in C Major. Rosetti, like Sweelinck and Buxtchude, had the bad luck of living and writing under the shadow of a greater contemporary, in his case, Mozart. His biography, where it is known at all, is full of the kind of unbelievable poverty and misery that dogged Mozart, and almost all of the 18th century German composers. In his day, every petty German prince had his court musicians and his "Kapellmeister" who trained the singers, trained and conducted the orchestra, played the organ, and wrote music on the side. Rosetti, who changed his name from Rossler to get a hearing in his own country when Italian music was the rage, was one of these. He called himself a "godly Philistine," and had a lot more talent as a composer than subsequent history has given him credit for. His newly finished Requiem, in fact, was performed in Prague at Mozart's death in 1791. His Sinfonia in G, being played tonight, sounds like good early Mozart or late Haydn.

The program is rounded off by nothing less than Bach's great orchestral suite in C major, a work with the symphonic proportions of one of its composer's Brandenburg concertos. All in all, the concert has a richness that harks back to the days when German orchestras used to play two concerti and two symphonies in one evening. The Boston Symphony could well take a hint from its rivals across the Charles.