A strange mixture of almost uniformly fine performance and a disorganized and occasionally disagreeable program formed the essential elements of last night's concert at Sanders Theatre. The credit can be evenly spread but the fault lies with the direction.

Even the Classical sections of the evening were filled with contradictions. Schubert's Fifth Symphony, the longest single work and the only one played as originally written, was technically the worst; in both first and third movements the orchestra fell apart, violins didn't play together and so on. And yet, the idea was there. Schubert is easy to play wrong; it can be slushy or dry or cute; to get the unique Schubert characteristic of Romantic Classicism and complex simplicity is difficult. But the orchestra, despite its momentary technical amnesia, got that blend perfectly.

Two pieces--a prelude and allegro by Couperin and an organ fugue of Bach--were played in modern orchestrations--by Milhaud and Williams respectively. Music critics of good taste have for years been screaming at conductors like Stokowski and Koussevitsky not to distort Bach, but when the orchestration is done by composers of the calibre of Williams and Milhaud, the result is quite different. Like a great translation which becomes a work of art by its own merits, a good transcription becomes a piece of music which can be enjoyed as a new work. Purists might still complain, but with far less justification. Two Bach cantata choruses were also enlarged, but not so successfully. Despite the quality of performance, the effect was marred by the excess of performers, especially in the second where a series of flute echoes were drowned out by the preceding blasts.

The glee club, like the orchestra, is an extremely competent organization, but the program hand-cuffed it. All five of the folk songs would have been very effective sung by one person and accompanied by a guitar, but when arranged for a solo voice, a piano, and a chorus of about eighty, they completely lose all characteristics of folk music. And when the diction is painfully clear and all the r's are carefully rolled, the contradiction becomes even more apparent. Folk songs do not belong on the concert stage.

But despite this necessary criticism of the arrangements of the works performed, the quality of performance was almost always excellent.