MUSIC REVIEW : Challender Leads Pacific Symphony

Australian conductor Stuart Challender strode to the podium at the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Wednesday with a lot in his favor. After all, he had Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto, two sure-fire hits, on his program. It didn’t result, however, in automatic success.

Challender, who is chief conductor and artistic director of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, was auditioning for the vacant music directorship of the Pacific Symphony.

He began with some ear-opening, orchestra-flexing music by Australian composer Richard Mills, his “Bamaga Dyptich” (1986). Inspired by the transition from the dry to wet season in northern Australia, it is an orchestral showpiece that unabashedly paints vivid pictures in brilliant, glittering colors. Its free-form impressionism puts one in mind of Ravel and Respighi, sometimes Messiaen.

The music bustles with activity and doesn’t stay with any one thing for long. High shimmers, swirling arpeggios and twinkling sonorities are a dominant feature. Muscularly long-lined melodies are set against chirping woodwinds and bells, punctuated by brass declamations and thundering percussion. The culmination is an athletically rhythmic rain dance, thrown exuberantly around the orchestra in a frenzy of celebration.

At almost 20 minutes, however, all this razzle-dazzle wears a bit thin. One is impressed by the composer’s virtuosic use of the orchestra but unmoved emotionally. Fault not Challender and the Pacific, however, who played with commanding technique and conviction.

Then pianist Alexander Toradze, a Van Cliburn Competition winner, joined the orchestra for the Rachmaninoff. He gave a willful and over-accented performance that seemed at odds with the arching lyricism of the piece. Balance between orchestra and pianist was an ongoing problem: Toradze’s hands were moving furiously, but only the occasional pounded note was heard.

When Toradze was more clearly in the foreground, his playing proved wildly erratic--unclear rhythmic outlines, muddled voicings and brittle tone production. Challender offered lush-toned support--he could have been playing a different piece.

Beethoven’s Fifth concluded the program. Challender gave a neat, respectable reading, never merely routine but not far above it, either. His balances strongly favored the string section, which played with impressive unanimity and burnished tone. It left many a crucial woodwind or horn line, however, subdued in the background, almost unheard; the music lacked their pointed attacks, their heroic weight. This was an earthbound Fifth.