MUSIC REVIEW : Din of Choppers Doesn’t Dampen Pops’ New Venue

Wednesday’s inaugural festivities of the San Diego Symphony’s pops season began on an ominous note.

As executive director Wesley Brustad welcomed the audience to the new SummerPops site on San Diego Bay, the din of a Navy helicopter overhead nearly obliterated his cheery words.

A major reason the symphony abandoned its former Mission Bay location was to escape the distraction of planes taking off from nearby Lindbergh Field. For the first half hour of Wednesday’s proceedings, however, it appeared that the elaborate move to Embarcadero Marina Park South--as the new site is designated by the San Diego Port Authority--had merely traded Lindbergh’s drone for noisy North Island choppers.

A half hour after Brustad’s speech, however, the wheezing whirlybirds disappeared. Ironically, their random accompaniment to the orchestra’s later boisterous rendition of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” popularly associated with the movie “Apocalypse Now,” would have provided the perfect complement.

But overall, the orchestra’s move to San Diego Bay represents a major improvement in outdoor venues. The new location offers better sight lines and a significantly improved sound system. Views of the city skyline to one side and the lights of Coronado on the other are pleasant, and the sheltered location is less wind-swept than the forlorn, exposed site at the tip of Mission Bay’s Hospitality Point, a.k.a. Hostility Point.

Guest conductor Alan Balter fulfilled Brustad’s program theme, “galactic gala opening,” with a lightweight potpourri of motion picture scores--John Williams’ “Star Wars” and “E.T.” and Jerry Goldsmith’s “Star Trek”--as well as excerpts from Gustav Holst’s programmatic suite “The Planets.” The orchestra played agreeably, although after a while, these fanfare-laden scores tended to run together. And the constant demands on the brass sections strained their customary reliability.

A well-tuned double brass choir preceded Brustad on stage without aid of conductor, although Benedetto Marcello’s “Psalm XIX” was a strange choice of liturgical music to herald the pops season. Balter did not come out until Brustad finished his welcoming speech and lengthy round of thank-yous to the Port Authority and assorted auxiliaries.

Balter’s portion of the program opened with Richard Strauss’ initial theme from “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” a trifling 12 measures that has apparently inspired Williams’ entire oeuvre. Balter, whose hyperactive conducting style left him too breathless for the usual pops patter, showed some sympathy for the disciplined extroversion of “Jupiter” and “Mars” from “The Planets.” Fortunately, the evening was not all space-age bombast. The orchestra’s finest offering was a gracefully nuanced interpretation of Johann Strauss’ “Blue Danube” waltz, which Balter treated as a genuine composition instead of the usual benign pops filler.