MUSIC REVIEW : A Mixed, East-West Bill by Shanghai Symphony

Continuing the parade of international orchestras visiting Southern California nearly every week from September through June, the touring Shanghai Symphony arrived in Costa Mesa Wednesday night. And made a mixed impression.

According to its own program note, the instrumental ensemble is more than 110 years old, an artifact of Western influence on mid-19th-Century China. Through the middle of our own century, the orchestra has changed character--the makeup of its personnel, that is--a number of times. At this moment, it seems to be composed exclusively of native Chinese musicians, mostly male.

Under Hou Run-Yu, its deputy music director and resident conductor, the group played an East-West program consisting of music by Berlioz, Rachmaninoff and the composing team of He Zhan-Hao and Chen Gang. The concert, in Segerstrom Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, was part of the Orange County Philharmonic Society’s Great Orchestras Series.

Great orchestra? Not exactly.

At its best, the band’s strings make attractive, mellow sounds; at their worst, those sounds emerge inconsistent, strident and thin. Woodwinds and brass seem to be accomplished as a group, merely provincial as soloists. The ensemble’s strongest musical lack is clear definition between its choirs, and an overall polish.

Nevertheless, as heard Wednesday, the 86-member orchestra can play well--up to a second-rank international standard--as it certainly did in the “Carnaval Romain” Overture and in the outer movements of Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony.

The Scherzo and Adagio of that familiar work exposed the middling level of the Shanghai players, though conductor Hou proved an able and knowledgeable leader throughout the program.

The novelty here was a very pretty violin concerto by the team of He and Chen, a 20-minute work of Mendelssohnian simplicity written in 1958 and recently turned into a showpiece for the two-string Chinese fiddle, the erhu.

As played by soloist Jiang Jian-Hua, the instrument and the concerto charmed completely. The piece itself, pentatonic in mode, pastoral and sentimental in mood, with cumulative climaxes of melodramatic urgency, could have been written in the 1940s as the score to a film. The large audience in Segerstrom Hall seemed to find it irresistible.

At the end of the evening, the Shanghai Symphony played one encore: Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever!”