SOLTI CONDUCTS : THE MIGHTY CHICAGO SYMPHONY IN COSTA MESA

The Chicago Symphony encountered a little trouble in San Francisco on Saturday.

The super-orchestra was ready, willing and able to play a prepackaged program devoted to Richard Wagner, John Corigliano and Ludwig van Beethoven. Unfortunately, the players’ scores, formal attire and instruments happened to be stranded somewhere in Arizona.

Unfazed by the picturesque perils of modern touring, Sir Georg Solti and his merry band improvised some chamber music. The 74-year-old conductor actually seized the occasion to make an impromptu U.S. debut as a pianist.

Then, with a little help from some local friends, the dauntless musicians ventured some conventional offerings wearing casual clothes--which is easy--and playing borrowed instruments--which isn’t.

The concert was, by all reports, a cozy triumph against the odds.

The concert given by Solti and the Chicago Symphony in the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Monday wasn’t quite so unusual.

Everyone looked spiffy in traditional black finery. Everyone had his or her own instrument to play. The program--the same as that scheduled for the ill-fated Bay City opening--went on without a hitch. The mighty maestro confined his re-creative endeavors to the podium.

Ho hum.

This was just an ordinary, garden-variety evening of high-powered and enlightened music making by an ensemble that remains one of the wonders of the modern world.

It took only a few soaring, aching, throbbing measures of the “Tristan” prelude to know that a great musical ensemble had come at last to Costa Mesa. Solti always commanded a special extroverted perspective of the grandiose Wagnerian sentiment. The Chicago Symphony has witnessed, and supported, the mellowing and refining of that perspective for nearly two decades.

On this occasion, Solti sustained a compelling aura of mystery, stressing endless, arching lines and subtle dynamic definitions. Then, in the “Liebestod,” the transparent textures slowly thickened, tension gradually rose to the breaking point, and passion turned ethereal.

This was a lofty conception, marvelously realized. It also was a performance that--apparently without benefit of in-house rehearsal--took optimum advantage of the bright, exceptionally resonant Segerstrom Hall acoustic.

The sonic showplace was tested further in John Corigliano’s bold, splashy and ultimately antiphonal Clarinet Concerto. Written in 1977 when the composer was 39 (and brilliantly performed two years later by Michele Zukovsky and the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta), this justly celebrated piece makes unrelenting demands on its performing locale as well as on its performers.

The opening movement is a gutsy, jittery, eventually rhapsodic network of cadenzas. A selectively dissonant orchestra soothes and/or echoes a fragmented mad scene for the agile, incredibly long-winded soloist.

The slow movement is a shimmering elegy in which the clarinet sings a poignant duet with the solo violin.

The whiz-bang finale is a wild toccata that quotes Gabrieli, flirts with serialism, affords the protagonist some frenzied bel-canto flights, uses the orchestra for massive punctuation, and sends nine brass and wind players out into the house for delirious echo effects and contrapuntal comments.

Larry Combs, Chicago’s principal clarinetist, traced Corigliano’s convoluted melodic course with dazzling bravado. Solti and the orchestra provided complementary propulsion and unflappably crisp articulation.

The auditorium allowed the assorted blasts and ripples of the offstage instruments to ricochet --from wall to wall, balcony to balcony, top to bottom--with blissful clarity and immediacy.

After intermission, the illustrious visitors returned to terra cognita with a brisk, emphatically energetic, technically meticulous performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

It could not have pleased those who prize spacious majesty and old-school pathos in this score. It did make undeniable sense, however, on its own flashy, urgent, pervasively nervous terms.

The capacity audience, sophisticated members of the Orange County Philharmonic Society, responded with discerning enthusiasm and, as regards applause, model decorum. This was a memorable night on both sides of the proscenium.