MUSIC REVIEW : Kazimierz Kord Conducts the Troubled Pacific Symphony

The top ticket for the Pacific Symphony costs an outrageous $52. Official blurbs blurb about “spectacular growth and achievement.” The posh Orange County Performing Arts Center provides a formidable setting. Under the circumstances, the patron has a right to expect wonderful things.

Unfortunately, the orchestra doesn’t deliver wonderful things, not yet anyway. It usually stumbles and bumbles, seriously and valiantly.

At the moment it seems to be engaged in The Great Conductor Search. It is an unsettling process.

Keith Clark, who founded the organization 10 years ago and lost it in an acrimonious power struggle last year, has become a non-person in the worst Soviet tradition. The management doesn’t deem it worthwhile or honorable to acknowledge his name--not in program credits or annotations, not even in historical references.

Until a new music director is announced next spring, the orchestra will play for a disconcerting parade of visitors--presumably candidates for the post. Occasionally it will play, as it did on Wednesday, under its official music adviser, Kazimierz Kord.

Chief conductor of the Warsaw Philharmonic and a celebrated force at the San Francisco Opera, Kord is a compelling, authoritative presence on any podium. There are definite limits to what he or anyone can accomplish, however, during a one-night stand.

Although the Pacific Symphony is, player for player, an excellent orchestra, it still isn’t much of an ensemble. It desperately needs the stability, the refinement and the unified perspective that can come only after a lengthy, ongoing relationship with an inspired and inspiring leader.

On this difficult occasion, Kord chose a rather oddly balanced agenda and conducted it with brisk efficiency. The results were pretty good, as far as they went. But, like Oliver Twist, one wanted more.

One wanted mellow strings, poised winds and impeccably balanced brass. One wanted thoughtful interpretive nuances. One wanted cleaner unison attacks and more precise articulation in agitated passages.

One also wanted a soloist worthy of a $52 admission tab. The soloist here was Sondra Gelb, an obscure and immature if promising mezzo-soprano engaged to sing Mahler’s shattering “Kindertotenlieder.” In an amateurish biographical sketch, the management told us what few assignments she has undertaken but not where, also that she “is married and resides in Virginia Beach.” That, of course, is reassuring.

Gelb suggested that she understands the tragic, fragile sentiment of Ruckert’s poems, even if she doesn’t know how best to project that sentiment. She buried the text in thick, dark tone, sometimes allowed the pitch to sag, and seemed to confuse expressive monotony with understatement. Kord and the orchestra provided unyielding accompaniment.

They had opened the concert with a singularly unsentimental, even brash, account of Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony. They closed it with an essentially fast and tough performance of the Schumann Fourth. Perhaps there will be time for polish and introspection later.

The program note for the Schumann, incidentally, included this nugget of enlightenment:

“In the 19th Century, some composers tried to unify an entire symphony with a single theme (in addition to the other themes in the various movements).”

It wasn’t a great night for communication.