MUSIC REVIEW : Macal Leads Pacific Symphony

With each guest conductor leading the Pacific Symphony while the search for a new music director goes on, the orchestra has responded with alertness and security.

Milwaukee Symphony music director Zdenek Macal took his turn Saturday with a New Year’s Eve pops program at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

Macal is an interesting conductor to watch. He feints, he jabs, he flirts, he pouts, he argues, he suffers. He plucks notes out of the air. He directs finger-shimmies at the musicians. He crouches to half his height for the right pianissimo, rises to bring the music to a climax and finishes with little, happy jumping hops. He is capable of singing along with the players at the most expressive moments.

For all that, the Pacific rarely gave him expressiveness to match, and it may not have been entirely the orchestra’s fault.

While always enforcing clarity, balance, proportion, exactness and discipline, Macal eschewed flights of lyricism or poetry. He could be fussy in detail, yet cool in overall aim and phrasing.

The overtures to Strauss’ “Die Fledermaus” and Offenbach’s “Orpheus in the Underworld” were vigorous and clean, but not sweet or sparkling. Even Offenbach’s famous cancan lacked a sense of fun.

The conductor and pianist Jeffrey Siegel pretty much missed the style boat in Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” Macal took a Teutonic, declamatory approach to the work, while Siegel viewed it as if he were playing Tchaikovsky’s virtuosic First Concerto or perhaps one of Prokofiev’s keen-edged works.

Siegel stabbed at the sustaining pedal with his right foot, kept time by tapping with his left, thundered at the keyboard with steely facility and occasionally veered into honky-tonk style as if an inner voice suddenly nagged, “Jazz score . . . Jazz score. . . .” But it was a sometime thing.

Macal enforced such rigid rhythms that when the big tune arrived, it sounded fatigued and oddly accented. Clarinetist Emily Bernstein, who in other works offered fine playing, proved tentative and inexpressive in the famous opening solo.

Everyone came off best in the Suite from Strauss’ “Der Rosenkavalier.” The orchestra sounded strong and secure, and Macal conveyed sweep and power but only a little of the poignancy and intoxication of this magical score.