MUSIC REVIEWS : Murry Sidlin Leads Long Beach Symphony

Murry Sidlin and the Long Beach Symphony have often shown a flair for the big pieces, the overtly dramatic, preferably programmatic works of the Romantic and modern repertory.

Saturday evening, in Terrace Theater at the Long Beach Convention Center, Sidlin and his dauntless band of musical overachievers capped a long, demanding program with Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13, “Babi Yar.”

That is not only a big work, but a tough, acerbic, moralistic one as well. Shostakovich set five poems by Yevgeni Yevtushenko--stubborn, gritty poems about repression, fear, anti-Semitism, hypocrisy and world-weary endurance--with equally stern, powerful, uncompromising music.

For all the gloom, however, Shostakovich does not despair. His thoroughly tonal, darkly scored music is as brutally honest as his texts, but unbowed by disillusion. Often angry, yes, and rising only to rueful irony in its lightest moments, “Babi Yar” retains a defiant insistence on individual integrity and brighter possibilities.

Bass Thomas Paul tackled the bitter, brooding, occasionally bellicose duties of the central narrator--in Russian--with a dark but clearly focused voice. Low-lying passages tended to fade into the often disputatious accompaniment, but otherwise Paul projected the wide ranging lines cleanly, with intense, pointed purpose.

The Cal State Long Beach Men’s Chorus and the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles sang the unison choral commentaries with smooth, well-balanced tone. The house lights remained up, so that Misha Schutt’s strong, literate translations could be followed.

Sidlin elicited sturdy, assertive though not invariably accurate orchestral playing. He began the evening with the more abstract, austere beguilements of Samuel Barber’s unduly neglected First Essay for Orchestra and a characteristically ripe, rhetorically unchecked reading of Richard Strauss’ “Tod und Verklarung.”