MUSIC REVIEW : Gilad Conducts Strawberry Creek Orchestra

In his third summer at Malibu, impresario-conductor Yehuda Gilad seems to have brought his Strawberry Creek Festival from near-oblivion to a certain glory. At least, that was the impression Saturday night at Pepperdine University, when Gilad led the second of four orchestral programs at the six-concert series in Smothers Theatre.

The glory here, shared by the more than four-dozen players of the festival orchestra and the soloist of the evening, pianist Daniel Pollack, was strictly musical; the thrust of this festival seems to be educational, daytime activities and master classes occupying the space between evening concerts.

Saturday, it consisted of really festive performances of three standard works, each clearly rethought in Gilad’s vivid, commanding, but seldom egocentric, conducting.

The orchestra, a mix of faculty and students, played with surprising cohesiveness and polish--the players cannot have been together as a unit much more than a week--predictable enthusiasm and an admirable sense of style and restraint. Smothers Theatre is a small (500-seat) hall, and the temptation to overplay must be great.

Schubert’s ebullient but mercilessly exposing Third Symphony became the ensemble’s showpiece; Gilad balanced lightness of textures with seriousness of content without apparent strain, and the orchestra seemed intent on building an ongoing performance, not just wallowing in a few attractive moments.

The same kind of intellectual honesty marked the playing, by 24 members of the ensemble, of Benjamin Britten’s Opus 1, the neo-Classic Sinfonietta (1932). Solo lines meshed with each other, strong instrumental balances obtained in most passages, and a sense of aural perspective, of structural integrity, characterized the total.

Still, the high point of this event was its center--a hair-raising but equally stylish and authoritative performance of Beethoven’s most familiar Piano Concerto, the “Emperor.”

Here, Pollack and Gilad achieved a thoroughly reconsidered, perfectly sculptured and spontaneously unfolding reading that laid out the work’s familiar contours in pristine condition.

The concerto emerged as if newly minted. Yet, for all the heat and light created, no braggadocio or haphazardness marred the musical landscape; this was as immaculate and tight a reading as this work may have ever received in a summer setting. Not only were conductor and pianist in clear agreement; orchestra and soloist remained effortlessly in sync.

Most important, the actual character of the piece--noble, reserved and articulate--was preserved, resulting in a combination of Dionysian passion with Apollonian control. Pollack has long been considered a specialist in the firebrand/poet repertory of Chopin, Liszt, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff; clearly, he has another, equally cherishable, side.