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Sturdy Mozart Stands Up to Church's Echo, by Joan Reinthaler. It was a menu of muscular Mozart that the Washington Sinfonietta brought to the National City Christian Church on Saturday. The chamber orchestra's new principal conductor, Joel Lazar (long-time conductor of the JCC Symphony - newly renamed "The Symphony of the Potomac") is an incisive leader and the pieces he took on, the Overture to "La Clemenza di Tito," the E-flat Sinfonia Concertante, K. 364, for Violin and Viola and the Symphony No. 38, the "Prague," were sturdy enough to stand up to little rough handling. It was the church's acoustics rather than technical shortcomings that muddied horn passages and smoothed the bite out of frolicking strings (and absent a working amplifying system, these acoustics also reduced Lazar's comments on the program to mush). But there were also times, particularly in the concluding Presto movements of the Symphony and
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