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MUSIC REVIEW : Pacific Symphony in Santa Ana High Outreach Concert

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SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

The Pacific Symphony’s Hispanic Outreach concert Wednesday night may not have been a model of musicianship, but it was certainly several notches above the routine level of most community concerts. This was thanks largely to the attentive direction of assistant conductor Lucas Richman, who took his task seriously, yet seemed to have a good time doing it.

The first of three Hispanic Outreach programs to be hosted over the next several months by the Pacific Symphony, Wednesday’s free concert in Santa Ana High School Auditorium attracted a large, young, almost wholly Latino audience, which murmured and rustled throughout the concert but also apparently enjoyed it.

In a program of short classical works, Richman led a reduced Pacific Symphony with more efficiency than inspiration, but managed to infuse most of what he conducted with energy. He sought warmth and weightiness in Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel” Prelude, coaxing a luxurious blend from horns and bassoons, and gently curved phrasing from the strings. Though the orchestra’s performance of selections from the “Nutcracker” wouldn’t win any awards for clarity or precision, it did have high spirits and, at times, grace.

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Less-successful performances of Smetana’s “Bartered Bride” Overture and the first movement of Bizet’s Symphony in C began the program. Murky textures largely obliterated distinct articulation and color in the brass and woodwinds. Risers for those instruments would have been welcome both sonically and visually, lifting their sound from the orchestral mass as well as allowing the audience to see those instruments in action--no small consideration.

Short works by Menotti, Vaughan Williams and three Latino composers rounded out the program. “El pais de los quatro pisos” by Puerto Rican composer Raymond Torres-Santos, a Cal State San Bernardino professor, is handsomely constructed and orchestrated music in the style of conservative film music. Carmen Dragon’s arrangement of “Jesusita en Chihuahua” might appropriately be subtitled “Or Bugs Bunny in Baja” for all its Looney Tunes extravagances, but it elicited enthusiastic audience response nevertheless. Also performed, with vigor, was Moncayo’s romping “Huapango.”

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