ORANGE COUNTY CENTER : CLARK, PACIFIC SYMPHONY ESSAY MAHLER’S THIRD

In the quality of its players--their many strengths, abundant instrumental resources and virtuosity as a unit--the Pacific Symphony has achieved, after more than seven full seasons, high professional status. The orchestra’s membership comprises an elite group of musicians.

In the quality of its performances, the ensemble’s record does not match its promise. Over the years, it has played both well and disappointingly. A vein of lackadaisicality runs through the body of its work, a vein all the more disheartening when one hears the orchestra on its better nights.

Wednesday night at Segerstrom Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center proved to be such an occasion, and the orchestra’s performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony one of its higher points.

Keith Clark, founder of the orchestra and its continuing music director, conducted the panoramic work--even among the peaks in Mahler’s wide-ranging oeuvre, it stretches the ear and inflames the imagination--with a sense of heat, focus and masterful timing that has at times been missing in his leadership. The entire work was laid out before the listener in an apprehendable continuity, its climaxes delivered in full instrumental splendor but without stridence, its thoughtful moments achieving both meditation and urgency.

In the mechanics of performance, there were no hitches. A choral richness emanated from the whole string body, but most especially from the crucial cello section. Winds and brass gave full voice to their critical utterances, yet remained mellow in grain.

And the solo instrumental lines were in the best possible hands, in particular those of trumpeter Anthony Plog, who made his third-movement soliloquy transcendent in sound and expressiveness.

Veteran contralto Maureen Forrester brought the breadth of textual and vocal richness to her fourth-movement duties. She was appropriately aided by the women of the Pacific Chorale and by a consortium of choirs called the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus, a group that had performed the work with forces from USC last month.

The performance was broken by an intermission after the extended first movement, a debatable break, but one sanctioned by precedent. Clark opened the program with the world premiere of Karel Husa’s “Entrata for Brass” (the players stationed in three places around the auditorium), an attractive warm-up piece just two minutes in length.