MUSIC REVIEW : South Coast Symphony at UC Irvine Barclay Theatre

Two important events took place Sunday afternoon in the Irvine Barclay Theatre, on the edge of the campus at UC Irvine:

First, the new auditorium, an elegant, 756-seat hall costing $17.6 million, hosted its first complete musical event.

Then, the South Coast Symphony, under its founder/conductor, John Larry Granger, inaugurated a second series in an acoustical venue clearly more beneficial to its musical pretensions than the problematic auditorium at Orange Coast College, where it has been resident since 1984.

Both events promise much for the future.

The new Cheng Hall, its welcoming interior handsome in dusky rose, all of its seats within 60 feet of the proscenium arch, is a most pleasant room, with lively but not strident acoustics and good sight-lines.

With its programming mandated to be divided equally between university, community and commercial uses, the Irvine Barclay facility can be an important cultural center in an area which has long needed an auditorium of this size--not to mention audience comfort.

Granger’s orchestra, a professional ensemble which has struggled with the sizable but unflattering Robert B. Moore Theater at OCC all these years, deserves the kind of musical help the new hall gives it. And every orchestra tends to perform better at a second performance--which this one was, the ensemble’s Costa Mesa season having begun the night before at OCC.

Solid, characterful playing marked the entire performance, devoted to three contrasting works, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Serenade to Music,” the Piano Concerto by Aram Khachaturian and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

In the Fifth, Granger took unexceptionable tempos, enforced them with gentlemanly ease and let the entire work unfold with compelling logic and fluency. Except for some scrappiness in the exposing slow movement, his orchestra played with tight balances, admirable ensemble values and strong soloism. And this reading climaxed, as it should but does not always, with a finale direct and unswerving in its impact.

In the Concerto, veteran pianist Leonard Pennario was the splendid, communicative and high-energy soloist, making what is certainly a cheap and tawdry piece seem almost elegant.

The full house in the new theater cheered Pennario relentlessly after the concerto, and was rewarded with two encores: Scriabin’s Prelude in D-flat for Left-Hand Alone, and Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s “Le Banjo.”

Vaughan Williams’ cherishable Serenade for orchestra and singers opened the proceedings appropriately. Here, the instrumental ensemble was assisted by the three-dozen members of the Lee Vail Singers and soloists Pamela Chapin, Nina Edwards, Leland Vail and Royce Reynolds. Granger presided over a mellow and noble performance.