MUSIC REVIEW : New Orchestra in West Coast Debut

Two of the last three times Michael Tilson Thomas conducted in Southern California, he was battling vainly against the aerial intrusions and extramusical noises that can mar outdoor concerts anywhere. So it was a particular pleasure Thursday night to encounter Tilson Thomas on his return here at an indoor concert site, making music in his own, recognizably brilliant and brainy manner.

In Segerstrom Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, this second event in a two-week series--titled the New World Music Festival--offered the first West Coast appearance of the New World Symphony. (A 75-member ensemble of young professionals based in Miami, the New World orchestra played its first concert in January, gave an inaugural Florida series thereafter and has already announced a second season, October-April, for 1988-89 in its home theater, the Gusman Center in Miami.)

Not to waffle: The new orchestra is a stunner, a highly accomplished, already polished band of virtuoso players of striking resources. More often than not, its strings produce aural velvet in a sound-package of instrumental clarity and tight ensemble. Its woodwinds and brass make brilliance a virtue, yet have in reserve the even more admirable ability to play softly--even to vary their quiet playing between several dynamic levels.

At the outset of this debut concert, in the opening movement of Janacek’s Sinfonietta, one worried about the raucousness of those brasses. As things turned out, this was the only case of overplaying in a two-hour performance; from the second movement onward, careful orchestral balances and well-planned architectonics characterized all the playing.

One assumes that Tilson Thomas is responsible for such early musical accomplishment by a group that has played together as a unit for less than seven months. He certainly can be given credit for these well-grasped, articulate and clarified readings of the Janacek work, Weber’s still-cherishable F-minor Konzertstuck for piano and orchestra and Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra.

The Concerto for Orchestra became a revelation of orchestral colors, transparent textures, insouciant soloism and kinetic climaxes. Only with difficulty might one recall a performance as sweeping and probing, as visceral and detailed.

At the opposite end of the program, Tilson Thomas in the Sinfonietta set things up: all contrasts specified, all statements caressed or attacked (as appropriate), all lines in balance. Even as he looked benign, the conductor seemed to exert a powerful control over these gripping performances.

The 26-year-old Frenchman Jean-Yves Thibaudet--he first appeared here in 1982 and played locally twice this past winter--returned to Southern California in the Weber piece, and made it all his own. Thibaudet’s pianistic facility appears wondrous and total; surprisingly, he accomplished this stylish performance with the handicap of an instrument that clearly could not produce all the colors and nuance his abilities encompass.

The festival continues through July 14; it is sponsored by a triumvirate of musical forces: the Orange County Philharmonic Society, UC Irvine and the performing arts center.