MUSIC REVIEW : St. Clair: A Loud Beginning

Carl St. Clair, the much touted incipient saviour of the Pacific Symphony Orchestra, is immensely talented. We all know that.

The 38-year-old conductor is bright and energetic. He brims with ideas and all but bursts with enthusiasm.

He obviously knows what he wants and--who knows?--one of these years he might get it. Thursday night, however, he had to contend with some vexing problems as he opened his second season at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

Some of the problems were of his own making. He did no one a favor, for instance, by choosing an unbalanced, even contradictory program that juxtaposed classic Beethoven with poignant Strauss with vulgar Ravel.

Even a virtuoso orchestra would have trouble making such a combination of popular disparities sound coherent. Still, a virtuoso orchestra might at least seize the challenge for a display of stylistic flexibility.

At this stage of its development, the Pacific Symphony is no virtuoso orchestra. And St. Clair, for all his frenetic dedication, is no miracle worker.

He made Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8, which opened the festivities, sound brisk and breezy. So far, so good.

He also made it sound tough and primitive. So far so bad.

Most damaging, he let it sound loud. For better or worse--make that worse--he allowed unbridled fortes to serve as a unifying force for the entire program.

If St. Clair cherishes a shimmering pianissimo, he failed to show it on this occasion. One can only blame so much stridency on the acoustical quirks of Segerstrom Hall.

For the inaugural centerpiece, St. Clair chose Richard Strauss’ elegiac Four Last Songs, a potentially grateful vehicle for the soprano Benita Valente. Broad tempos and expansive phrasing did much to support the pathos of these romantic valedictories, though the orchestra frequently blanketed the fragile soprano. One yearned for the introspection that comes with dynamic restraint.

Valente sounded radiant, even ethereal, in Strauss’ ascending lines. Her tone tended to evaporate, however, whenever the line dipped low, and she settled for a generalized, monochromatic delivery of the subtle Hesse and Eichendorff poems.

The audience destroyed the mood of sublime nostalgia and resignation by applauding after every song. The non-listeners had done the same insensitive thing when Leontyne Price performed the same music five years ago at the second concert ever given in this house.

If only the clap-happy enthusiasts--who similarly disrupted the progression of the Beethoven symphony--had bothered to look at the stage, they might have noticed that neither the soprano nor the conductor acknowledged the premature applause that threatened their concentration. Some aesthetic lessons are learned slowly in Orange County.

Ravel’s second “Daphnis et Chloe” suite always whomps the listener with easy exotic effects amid an aura of cheap French perfume. Coming after the Strauss, it suggested a merciless attack by the mighty kitsch brigade.

Ironically, the worst music on the program received the best performance. St. Clair exulted in the sometimes splashy, often drippy rainbows of orchestral color as well as the ultimate heroic climaxes. The Pacific Symphony mustered precision here to match brio (Ravel never worried much about smudges, anyhow), and the Pacific Chorale mustered a splendid noise in what the wry new program annotator described as a “final, orgiastic dance of joy for the whole crew.”

The content of the printed programs, incidentally, has improved. Now, perhaps someone in the management will care enough to check the epidemic of typographical errors.