Music Reviews : L.B. Symphony Offers Adams, Martinu Works

Jorge Mester’s engaging blend of the enterprising and the familiar generally travels well, as a packed Terrace Theatre at the southern end of the Long Beach Freeway found out Saturday night.

While the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra may not be as sleek a vehicle as Mester’s Pasadena Symphony, it could still get him from place to place efficiently most of the time.

John Adams’ chug-chugging, good-natured bit of minimalist mockery, “The Chairman Dances,” is threatening to become a regular part of the repertory these days. And Mester did the piece a great favor Saturday by viewing it from a different angle.

This was a more urgent performance than the Edo de Waart model, one that was thoroughly at home with the swinging syncopations of Adams’ swipes from Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements.

Instead of merely cruising along with Adams’ motor rhythms, Mester chose to bring out the inner voices, crashing them against the minimalist groove and letting the contradictions sort themselves out. Indeed, Mester proved that “The Chairman Dances” is strong enough to withstand more than one viewpoint.

Next, Mester pulled out another bundle of contemporary contradictions in Bohuslav’s Martinu’s “Fantaisies Symphoniques” (Symphony No. 6). This was the last entry in Martinu’s symphonic cycle--and it sounds like a final statement with its ominous, swirling dissonances, its brief bursts into the sunlight that quickly fall back into the murk, and its gentle eulogy at the close. While Martinu’s symphonies are finally coming into their own in the CD catalogue, they remain strangers in our concert life--and Mester performed a valuable service by making such a vital, sympathetic case for the Sixth.

Yet after these splashes of 20th-Century color, Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1 seemed like a large, gray, immobile lump.

Pianist David Buechner exhibited some good qualities--a willingness to search and ruminate with rhapsodic rubatos, a nice headlong plunge into the theme of the Rondo. Yet there was little sense of direction about the search, and the concerto often drifted aimlessly as a result. Also the orchestra did not respond as wholeheartedly as it did earlier, most noticeably in the shredded fugue of the Rondo.