Music : Falletta Puts It All Together in Long Beach

Assembling a broadly appealing program lacking a single familiar work takes skill, insight and a gambler’s daring.

Conductor JoAnn Falletta provided the winning formula in her juicy agenda for Saturday’s Long Beach Symphony concert in the Terrace Theater.

The present was served with Joan Tower’s 1981 “Sequoia,” in its local premiere; the modern-master slot was filled by Copland’s 1926 Piano Concerto--a supposedly faded period piece--while the popular Romantic symphony was in fact the inexplicably rarely heard Dvorak Sixth.

“Sequoia” has a program: something to do with the physical construction of the California redwood, reflected in the music. This hardly helpful intelligence aside, “Sequoia”--a very loud tree, in Tower’s rendering--aims for the ears and gut, with its shimmering percussion washes and hefty brass climaxes, and hits them unerringly.

The pianist in Copland’s irresistibly pungent Concerto was a young American dynamo named Christopher O’Riley, who had its evocative impressionism as completely in hand as its jazzy syncopations and thunderous climaxes. The orchestra was a brilliant partner in a work that is essentially a piano-orchestra dialogue rather than a solo showpiece.

Dvorak’s D-major Symphony requires cooler, more thoughtful leadership than these 20th-Century works, but Falletta and her forces proved no less mettlesome here. The performance was both energetic and refined, the killer tune of the slow movement elegantly projected and Falletta and ensemble punching out the scherzo’s ferocious cross-rhythms with gleeful panache.

Prior to Dvorak, Falletta and the Long Beach strings produced a touchingly simple, handsomely balanced reading of the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, played in memory of Leonard Bernstein.