MUSIC REVIEW : Academy’s Second Pasadena Program Disappoints

If conductor Neville Marriner had brought the same wit and insight to the main program that he did to the second encore at a concert by the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields at Ambassador Auditorium, all would have been well.

But if the Overture to Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” proved a model of springy style, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 remained a closed book; Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 5 unfolded as a mere study in sustained, muted lyricism; and the Overture to Weber’s “Euryanthe” proved only a spirited throat-clearing exercise.

On Tuesday, Mariner led a ponderous, graceless, joyless account of the Beethoven symphony Wagner considered the apotheosis of the dance.

Not even the superb Academy musicians could articulate the theme of the last movement, given Marriner’s speedy tempos and blunt-instrument approach. The closing measures became an orgy of crude percussive blasts.

Mercifully, Marriner avoided taking any of the major repeats. Fortunately, the first encore--the soothing Intermezzo from Delius’ “Fennimore and Gerde”--offered much needed balm to irritated sensibilities.

In his Fifth Symphony, Vaughan Williams drew on themes of his opera on Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” Surely some of the struggles, passions and affirmations of faith of the opera made their way into the Symphony.

Marriner, however, conducted the work as if all of that were under glass. Some might like their Vaughan Williams in this vaporish way. But others would find the colorist devices--hushed string passages and pianissimo muted horns--scant compensation for such lacks as a deeply-felt English horn solo that duplicates the Pilgrim’s final, ineffable words of faith in the opera: “He hath given me rest by His sorrow and life by His death.”

Marriner opened the concert with a crisp, perfunctory account of Weber’s Overture.