CONDUCTOR SIDLIN AT THE PODIUM : L.B. SYMPHONY OPENS ITS 53RD SEASON

In the world of orchestras, what separates mere conductors from genuine music directors is, more often than not, a gift for programming. Murry Sidlin, who opened his Long Beach Symphony’s 53rd season, Saturday night in Terrace Theater at the Long Beach Convention Center, has the gift.

Sidlin demonstrated that again, in building an agenda comprising Jacob Druckman’s 25-minute “Prism” (1980), Saint-Saens’ Piano Concerto No. 5 and the Third Symphony by Tchaikovsky. To this already-provocative lineup, he added only the National Anthem, played, of course, at the beginning of the event, but designed--aside from whatever idealistic or political motives--to seize audience attention, create an instant sense of community and gently prepare ears for dissonance. It was a brilliant move.

Druckman’s complicated, three-movement reworking of “Medea” materials by Gustave Charpentier, Pier Francesco Cavalli and Luigi Cherubini, being heard in its local premiere performance, needs such preparation. In its first two parts, it is a nightmarish juxtaposition of Baroque fragments--shards, really, for the fragments are jagged--and asymmetrical atonality. In the final portion, with the Cherubini excerpt tying it all together, a sense of order penetrates the conflict, which is at last resolved. What it all means remains unanswered, but at least the composer has reached a conclusion.

Conductor Sidlin seemed to make eminent sense of all this, and his orchestra played splendidly.

It did the same, though not always consistently, in the exposed terrain of Tchaikovsky’s Third, wherein Sidlin stressed the strong emotions and lyric underpinnings of the composer’s masterful writing. At its best--in the “Alla Tedesca,” the slow movement and the finale--the orchestra’s accomplished string choir, brass section and woodwind soloists played handsomely.

In accompanying Lorin Hollander’s almost irresistible way with the “Egyptian” Concerto, Sidlin & Co. went even farther--they practically raised the roof. Except that Hollander does not color his strident and monochromatic tone in the myriad ways one wants to hear the piano treated in this work, he made of it an exceptional vehicle for display and communication, and captured all hearts--at least all the many hearts filling this auditorium. No applause broke the tense silence between movements, but at the end, the noise of approbation appropriately rent the air.