CLASSICAL MUSIC REVIEW : John Alexander, Pacific Chorale Open 20th Season at Arts Center

Conductor John Alexander and the Pacific Chorale opened their 20th season Tuesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center with a program that showed Alexander’s firm commitment to taking the high road of artistic development.

Alexander offered no self-gratulatory speeches, no easy or familiar repertory, no repetitions from recent seasons. He took on Vaughan Williams’ huge, sometimes ungainly, often inspiring “Sea Symphony” and Delius’ chromatically demanding “Sea Drift,” also leading the Pacific Symphony in both works.

It was the kind of program and vision that one wants to cheer. Make a firm commitment to quality and the world will beat a path to your door.

But things weren’t quite as satisfactory as one wished Tuesday.

Alexander led a sturdy, competent reading of the “Sea Symphony,” where one longed for a heroic account that glowed with conviction and crackled with energy.

The work, after all, contains the composer’s incomparable settings of two of Walt Whitman’s most striking mystical visions: a scene on the beach where the poet sees “a vast similitude” spanning all nations and all time and Whitman’s imagined view from cosmic distances of the earth “swimming in space . . . and the teeming spiritual darkness.”

Alexander’s approach to all this seemed more suitable for an oratorio than a dramatic symphony. He sculpted broad effects and created occasional high points. But one hoped for more overall contrast, a telling shaping of lines and insight into details.

Soloist John Atkins may have been suffering from uncharacteristic vocal problems. His weighty, steely-bright baritone grew inexpressive and strained, especially at the top of the range, during the course of his extensive, crucial duties. But his real lack was failing to color or interpret the text.

Angelique Burzynski, however, brought a fine-toned, silvery soprano to her brief responsibilities and sang with conviction.

The 140-member chorale demonstrated its customary vocal depth and richness, but there were occasionally problems in understanding the words. Despite some timidity in the exposed brass attacks, the Pacific Symphony offered substantial support.

In “Sea Drift,” Alexander led the chorus securely through the composer’s cruelly chromatic lines. But Atkins was insufficiently involved in the narration, and that, together with the inevitable choral blur given the chromaticism and part-writing, lessened the drama of the work considerably.

Alexander opened the program with two unaccompanied works: Delius’ short, wordless chorus “To be Sung of a Summer Night on the Water” and--without stopping for a pause--Charles Villiers Stanford’s brief “The Bluebird.” In each, the chorale sang with focus and tender, floating phrases.