MUSIC REVIEW : Pacific Group Offers McGurty World Premiere

In any age, finding, identifying and disseminating important new works is the real function of any musical community--but it is a function too often neglected.

Launching the yearlong celebration of the Orange County Centennial Saturday night at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre, Keith Clark and his Pacific Symphony not only offered a festive--and splendidly performed--inaugural concert, they also tended to the important business of new music.

As the composer had promised, the world premiere performance of Mark McGurty’s Piano Concerto revealed an old-fashioned virtuoso showpiece unself-consciously based on accepted models.

The rousing, Lisztian opening owes much to the dense, later works of Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev; the melodious, central Andante is a direct descendant of the corresponding movement in Ravel’s G-major concerto; the finale speaks the language--even the musical dialect--of George Gershwin.

“I purposely wrote a piano concerto to be heard outdoors in a place holding more than 10,000 people, and I intended it to be accessible,” McGurty--whose credentials, as a protege of composers like David Diamond, Elliott Carter and Keith Clark, are certainly in order--told a reporter last week. He has succeeded.

And not necessarily with any loss of personal integrity. The new piece--a big-boned but tightly compressed composition for full orchestra and heavy-duty soloist, 24 minutes in length--may not have a lot in common with the Carterian complexities of McGurty’s chamber music (at 33, he has already written eight string quartets). Or with the Boulezian clarifications of his recent cantata, “Pour un tombeau d’Anatole.”

But, even with all its influences clearly to be heard, the Piano Concerto has a life and scenario of its own. It grabs and convinces the listener relentlessly. And its appeal is both visceral and tuneful. Eclecticism is a method, not a sin.

Bryan Pezzone was the resourceful piano soloist--unfortunately, not always clearly transmitted through the amphitheater’s sound system. Clark and the players of the Pacific Symphony, some of them different from the players seen at other Pacific Symphony events this year, gave the new work an enthusiastic send-off, one apparently attesting adequate rehearsal.

Strong preparation also characterized Clark’s tight reading of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the climactic second half of this celebration program. Cohesiveness of concept seemed to bind the opening movements, which reached a peak of concentrated heat and clearly focused instrumentalism in the Adagio.

In the choral finale, the combined Pacific, Orange Coast and Saddleback chorales began raucously and without careful modulation of their dynamic resources; as the movement progressed, they showed a finesse more equal to that of their orchestral colleagues’. Healthy, full-throated and nicely gauged vocalism was the rule from the gifted solo quartet, which comprised Anita Protich, Jacalyn Bower, William Olvis and James Patterson.

At the beginning of the evening, low-flying aerial intruders--big planes, not helicopters--and more than one crying infant threatened to drown out the curtain-raising “Egmont” Overture.