MUSIC REVIEW : Pacific Symphony at the Performing Arts Center

Music of our time proved the strongest part of the four-part Pacific Symphony program Wednesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. But the music of good, old papa Haydn took a beating.

Before conducting Karel Husa’s “Music for Prague 1968,” music director Carl St. Clair turned to the audience to explain the origins and extramusical ideas of this passionate musical protest of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Although undoubtedly well-intentioned, St. Clair must have been unaware of the fact that the music of Husa is not exactly unknown to Orange County audiences and distrustful that it might speak eloquently enough on its own terms.

Under founding music director Keith Clark, the Pacific Symphony gave the world premiere of Husa’s “Entrata for Brass” at the Center in 1987, and the composer himself led the orchestra in “Music for Prague” at Santa Ana High School in 1986.

Certainly St. Clair led a committed and strong performance of this dramatic, arresting work, originally written for wind band. He traced a steady line from the frail, ominous opening through the spectral percussion meditation to the final declamations of triumph.

Haydn’s Symphony No. 49 (“La Passione”), however, showed major flaws in the orchestra’s competency in literature from this period. Despite playing from a reduced ensemble of approximately 30 musicians, entrances and rhythms lacked crispness and unity, contrasts in color and dynamics were minimized and the long string lines proved routinely flaccid, their tension and energy fading out before the end of a phrase.

The result overall was to make the work sound self-effacingly polite, passionless and dreary.

Benjamin Pasternack proved a modest, often moonstruck soloist in Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G, concentrating on flutteringly light if swift finger work. In the slow movement, where he might have capitalized on such subtlety, he chose instead to emphasize a strong, seamless arc virtually from the opening chords to the final trill. The problem was, it was an uninflected, undifferentiated, unmagical arc.

St. Clair followed attentively, allowing the orchestra players, particularly the wind section, more emotional expansiveness. But despite stop-on-a-dime precision at the end of movements, there were moments of ragged coordination between orchestra and soloist.

In “La Valse,” which closed the program, St. Clair traversed Ravel’s metaphoric history of the dance--from origins to degeneration--with hard drive and without providing much of an interval of swooning lilt. The orchestra responded, however, with unison punch, especially in the big climax.