Dance and Music Reviews : Pasadena Symphony Opens 62nd Season

Showoff programs sometimes materialize toward the middle or at the end of symphonic seasons. To begin the 62nd year of the Pasadena Symphony, however, Jorge Mester jumped right in with a bold agenda: Stravinsky’s “Petrushka,” the Fifth Violin Concerto of Vieuxtemps, and Ravel’s “La Valse.”

In the event, Saturday night in the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, the orchestra’s music director--who recently signed a contract extending his leadership in Pasadena through 1993--made it work, and rather effortlessly. The orchestra played superbly well, in near-perfect wind-string balances and with brilliant solo contributions from the first-desk players.

“La Valse” closed the proceedings with an illuminating clarity of instrumental textures and a Ravelian kaleidoscope of colors; this is the kind of playing Pasadena Civic does not always hear when famous orchestras from far away occupy its stage.

“Petrushka,” too, profited from a well-wrought, transparent fabric of sound and from the high energy produced by genuinely confident, virtuosic players.

In between, Anne Akiko Meyers, the 19-year-old, California- and Juilliard-trained violinist, brought vigorous mastery, unflinching technical skills and stylish elegance to the still-viable Romantic requirements of Vieuxtemps’ quirky but lovable A-minor Concerto. She made the old-fashioned rhetoric seem compelling, and faltered never in the apparently unending mechanical hurdles the work presents. Affectionately, Mester & Co. followed suit.