PHILHARMONIC SOCIETY’S NEW SEASON

After 32 years of presenting major symphonic ensembles in college gymnasiums, high school auditoriums, and worse, the Orange County Philharmonic Society, the oldest continuing presenter of musical attractions in the county, finally moved into an appropriate home, this week.

In a gala, first-night performance by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Kurt Sanderling and with Isaac Stern as violin soloist, the society opened its 12-event, two-series, 1986-87 season, Thursday night in Segerstrom Hall at the 10-day-old Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

The L.A. Philharmonic, stealing its own thunder from the opening of its 23rd season in the Pavilion of the Music Center, next Thursday, played magnificently.

Seated flat on the stage floor of the new Orange County facility, the orchestra sounded handsome, balanced and near the top of its form in an exposed agenda made up of Wagner’s “Meistersinger” Prelude, a Romance by Dvorak, Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto and the Eighth Symphony of Beethoven.

What Sanderling’s exigent leadership brought to this program of standards was rhythmic impetus, an inescapable linearity, the calm of maturity and a projected sense of the inner life of each work.

Beethoven’s optimistic Eighth Symphony emerged in Sanderling’s full-blooded reading a kaleidoscope of happy moods. In what seems a most commodious home for orchestral sound, the strings of the ensemble sang forth without raucousness, and the wind sections blended unstrainedly. Dynamic contrasts appeared naturally; the pizzicatos at the end of the first movement actually rang in the hall.

Sanderling began the evening with the appropriate boldness of the “Meistersinger” Prelude, giving it its own majesty and authority, plus unexpected lightness and clarity. For once, all the inner, contrapuntal workings were audible.

With his aristocratic phrasing and incontrovertible sense of line intact, Stern created, in the overfamiliar Mendelssohn Concerto and the less-hackneyed Dvorak Romance, musical structures of admirable sturdiness and poignant effect.

Technically, the veteran violinist encountered moments of fuzzy tone and unfocused intonation, but those moments did not mar the overall achievement and playfulness of his readings. The full-house audience, which on this occasion did not spoil any of the proceedings with inappropriate applause, gave Stern a standing ovation after the concerto.