MUSIC REVIEW : St. Clair Opens Pacific Season

The Pacific Symphony has endured some trying vicissitudes since its first concert back in 1978. This dauntless orchestra has survived growing pains that culminated two years ago in a nasty public battle over internal leadership.

Exit Keith Clark. The stubborn idealist founded the ensemble, nurtured it, oversaw its ascent to glamour at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, and finally fell victim to his own limitations as music director.

Enter Carl St. Clair. The 38-year-old conductor from Hocheim, Tex., via Boston won most hearts here in January when he filled a guest engagement that actually served as an audition. On Tuesday, he returned to open the Pacific Symphony season and, more significantly, to inaugurate his tenure as music director.

The official hype breathlessly heralded a “new era of excellence.” That description implied an undeniably candid, surprisingly unflattering value judgment on the old era.

Oh, well. That was then. This is now. Now! The downbeat, please, Maestro.

There will be ample opportunity to gauge St. Clair’s excellence quotient as he really gets to know the Pacific Symphony, and vice versa. One judgment, however, doesn’t seem premature: Music making isn’t going to be perfunctory around here any more.

St. Clair is intelligent, eager, sensitive and imaginative. He also appears to be something of a technical wizard. It takes about five minutes to ascertain all that.

He knows what he wants. He knows how to get it.

He is the sort of musician audiences love to watch. Slim and lithe, he cuts a dashing figure on the podium. But he doesn’t cultivate the usual romantic images.

Although he indulges in a lot of interpretive dancing, his feet leave the floor only figuratively. He doesn’t waste much energy beating time or issuing obvious cues. That would be too elementary. He is more concerned with sculpting phrases in the air, and he sculpts hypnotically.

Placing the unconsulted score on a music stand at knee level, as if it were just a safety net, he concentrates on basics: propulsion, dynamic flexibility, rhythmic vitality, nuance, melodic flow. The man has ideas.

The Pacific Symphony is not yet a precision instrument. Still, it responds to his ideas with sympathetic dedication and with flashes of bravura promise.

St. Clair leans forward toward his players, cocks his head, listens, smiles, swivels his hips. He weaves his spell.

His expressive instructions are unabashedly physical. Unlike many a celebrated colleague, however, he seems to be conducting the music, not the audience.

He can get excited. At one point, he knocked aside the concert-master’s music stand with a particularly sweeping gesture to the violins.

He can sustain control, even when excited. He caught that music stand, returned it to its upright position and continued conducting without disrupting so much as a hemidemisemiquaver of musical traffic.

He places the violas to his right, in front of the cellos. The configuration, possibly traceable to his conditioning with the Boston Symphony, adds welcome definition to the string choirs within the acoustical blur of Segerstrom Hall.

The festive evening began with music--a sophisticated five-minute fanfare by William Kraft, commissioned for the opening. Miraculously, we were spared anthems and speeches.

The introductory exercise, taut yet amazingly expansive in matters of color and texture, bore the title “Vintage 1990-91.” It turned out to be a splendid piece d’occasion and a welcome reminder that St. Clair’s sympathies are not rooted entirely in the past.

Next came the exotic insinuation of Ravel’s “Alborada del gracioso.” St. Clair conducted it with the savoir-faire of a high-class snake charmer. He even made the splashy banality sound elegant.

The stellar showpiece, a vehicle for Bella Davidovich, was Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. The same potboiler, incidentally, had been chosen for the opening of the San Diego Symphony season last week, when Horacio Gutierrez served as dazzling piano soloist.

Davidovich tried to focus on dreamy lyricism rather than percussive drama. Meandering through the 24 variations, she paused to savor the slush of No. 18. St. Clair and the orchestra provided sensitive accompaniment for her generally soft and fuzzy performance.

Their own showpiece came after intermission with Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. They made it a brisk and energetic showpiece, breezing glibly through an eminently non-funereal Allegretto and nearly reducing the not-so-grand finale to a scramble.

St. Clair’s Beethoven, though clear-eyed and light-textured, sometimes approached callous frenzy. Even so, it sustained an undeniable pitch of excitement.

It also had a distinct point of view. It was never dutiful, never dull. One couldn’t make claims like that when the Pacific Symphony ventured Beethoven in the bad old days.

A bright beginning . . . .