CELEBRATION OF THE BANAL : PACIFIC SYMPHONY AT ORANGE COUNTY CENTER

Important conductors and major orchestras will not be strangers at Segerstrom Hall.

Before the inaugural season at the magnificent Orange County Performing Arts Center ends, the podium will have been manned by Zubin Mehta, Kurt Sanderling, Andre Previn, Georg Solti, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Christoph von Dohnanyi, Kazimierz Kord and Lorin Maazel.

The open stage will be populated by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Orchestre National of France and the Warsaw Philharmonic.

But while the stellar guests come and go, Keith Clark and the Pacific Symphony Orchestra will stay.

With more than 40 dates in the hall, they will serve as permanent orchestral fixtures. Is that good news?

On the basis of the super-hoopla concert blasted at a nearly full house Thursday night--a concert replete with fireworks, marching band on the street and conspicuous wining plus dining in the hotel next door--the answer has to be a guarded, regretful no.

The local ensemble, now in its eighth brave season, seems to command a number of excellent instrumentalists. Clark seems to command vast ambition and a decent technique.

It is nice. But somehow it isn’t enough. It isn’t what one expects in a snazzy $70-million arts emporium with pretentions of international standards.

The get-acquainted program turned out to be a stultifying celebration of the trite and the untrue. The banalities bypassed the National Anthem--one can be grateful for small favors--but offered little compensatory uplift in Berlioz’s “Roman Carnival” overture. It merely made a mighty noise.

In this case, noise is the right word.

Unlike his two Philharmonic predecessors, Clark placed the winds, brass and lower strings on risers. This heightened aural separation of choirs and augmented bass presence. The inherent advantages were all but negated, however, by pervasively loud, crude, ponderous and seemingly thoughtless music making.

In general, Clark beat time fussily and efficiently. If he harbored any individual ideas about what the music meant, he managed to keep those ideas a secret.

The Berlioz sounded like a spotty run-through. Strauss’ “Don Juan” exulted, rather jerkily, in breathless flamboyance for its own empty-headed sake. Respighi’s supremely vulgar “Pines of Rome” emerged even more tawdry than usual, with canned bird calls blaring comically from the loudspeakers and unbridled decibels frequently crossing the pain threshold.

The sound was raucous, incidentally, at the front of the second tier during the first half of the concert. It also was raucous at the rear of the orchestra level during the second half. The Segerstrom acoustic is, if nothing else, consistent.

The soloist of the evening was Henryk Szeryng. Official Pacific Symphony hype claimed he is “recognized throughout the world as this century’s finest violin virtuoso.”

That news may come as something of a surprise to those who know the best work of Kreisler, Heifetz, Milstein, Stern, Perlman, Ricci, Elman, Francescatti, Menuhin and half a dozen others.

The news certainly will come as a shock to those who heard Szeryng’s dull, small-scale performance of the Brahms Concerto on Thursday.

This was the work of a potentially patrician artist, to be sure, but here he seemed to be functioning much of the time on automatic pilot. Complicating matters, his slender tone tended to evaporate in the wide, open spaces, and one couldn’t overlook the chronic disparity between his intimate perspective and Clark’s sledge-hammer accompaniment.

INCIDENTAL INTELLIGENCE:

(1) According to a program note, the concert was recorded live for Pro Arte Records. Optimism is alive and deluded in Costa Mesa.

(2) Orange County audiences persist in applauding between movements. Musical continuity be damned.

(3) The acoustics are so clear on both sides of the Segerstrom proscenium that an innocent cough becomes an instant part of the musical fabric. So much for unwonted and unwanted percussive counterpoint.