Music Reviews : Pasadena Symphony

For about 10 minutes Saturday night, Pasadena Civic Auditorium became the site of a pep band. You know, the kind that plays at high school basketball games to rev up spirit and add pizazz.

But the sounds were deceiving. For this was the Pasadena Symphony, led by Jorge Mester, in the local premiere of Todd Levin’s “TURN extended dance mix,” a piece that does not exactly make him the Andy Warhol of music--no matter how he tries.

And the effort was ambitious, though hardly better than its model. A samba rhythm took hold and subsided only briefly. A lonely, dull drumbeat served as underpinning. The brass section discharged melodic riffs. All this, while the strings either did nothing or sawed away at their ungrateful parts.

Surely there’s a more clever, more thoughtful way to consecrate the banality of pop culture. Without looking further, Mester and his guest soloist, Edith Chen, moved on to a sure thing, Prokofiev’s ever-popular Third Piano Concerto.

Conductor and orchestra met the propulsive-rhapsodic challenge and provided stop-on-a-dime ensemble for the crashing climaxes, though one wished for more sonic body at those moments. And Chen commanded the strength, fluency, passion and motoric drive to claim rights. She also brought arrestingly seductive touches to the lyric passages, while her concentration kept the performance all of a piece.

The evening ended with Mussorgsky’s ubiquitous “Pictures at an Exhibition,” smoothly played and uneventful except for a brutally exposed trumpet bobble at the beginning.