30-YEAR DELAY : A MENNIN PREMIERE IN PASADENA

Peter Mennin, who died in 1983 at the age of 60, enjoyed the reputation of a solid composer and a brilliant educator. Perhaps enjoyed is the wrong verb. Try suffered .

As president of the Juilliard School, he was revered, possibly even feared. His symphonies and chamber works got performed from time to time. A few actually were recorded.

He was treated with generalized respect. Still, he was regarded in most quarters as an academician first and foremost. The fashionable avant-garde dismissed him, of course, as a hopeless conservative.

Mennin’s image could change. At a time when neo-romantic sensibilities are no longer automatically suspect, his essentially rugged, energetic, somber musical language could take on unexpected powers of persuasion.

He was, after all, a composer who found life in the old forms, one who savored the distinction between dramatic dissonance and harmonic chaos for its own sake. He also was a superb technician.

It took 30 years for his taut, slightly monochromatic Cello Concerto to arrive on the West Coast. It might have taken longer if Jorge Mester, a Mennin champion of long standing, weren’t music director of the Pasadena Symphony.

Saturday night at the Civic Auditorium, Mester joined the cellist Gary Hoffman in a mutually sympathetic demonstration of Mennin’s dramatic urgency and lyrical poignancy.

Hoffman, who happened to be born the year the work was written, displayed keen intelligence, virtuosity and stamina in the cruel but rewarding solo challenge. His tone--he plays a 1662 Amati--may have been more compelling for purity than for power, but the performance benefited from authority, clarity and cumulative ardor.

Mester had opened the program with the frenetic flourishes of Dvorak’s “Carnival” Overture. He closed it with the bravura heroism and muted grotesquerie of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra. The conductor stressed forward momentum, subtle wit and expressive refinement wherever possible.

Apart from some passing discrepancies in violin phrasing, the orchestra responded with exceptional power, not to mention precision and flair. This, without question, is a big-league ensemble.

As heard from a center seat in the front of the balcony, incidentally, the orchestra projected remarkable resonance, brightness and presence in the Dvorak and Mennin.

Heard downstairs from a side seat at the rear, the Bartok sounded mellower, a bit distant, slightly lacking in high-string definition. Even here, however, the Civic Auditorium was anything but the acoustical monstrosity of yore.

At the beginning of the evening, Mester and the non-capacity audience saluted Lorion Stillion, a member of the bass section for 50--count ‘em, 50--years.