MUSIC REVIEWS : Pasadena Symphony Opens Season

Music director Jorge Mester launched the Pasadena Symphony’s new season in Pasadena Civic Auditorium on Saturday with Beethoven’s hard-charging “Leonore” Overture No. 3 and concluded with Holst’s egregious “The Planets.”

The Beethoven proved rousingly rowdy: fast-paced and rhythmically taut, with rather impatient treatment of the reflective passages. The ensemble may not have been the neatest, but then this was merely an appetizer to the gut-stuffing “Planets.”

The show was, however, quietly stolen by repertory rarely encountered these days: eight orchestral songs of Richard Strauss.

Enlightened nepotism came into play with the choice of soloist Kimball Wheeler--the conductor’s wife--whose creamy, true mezzo-soprano rode the orchestral undulations with unfailing aplomb, most notably in “Das Rosenband,” “Morgen” and “Wiegenlied.”

Ironically, Strauss’ lyric flights were countered by the earthbound clatter of “The Planets.” One could appreciate Mester’s intelligently controlling hand of the huge orchestral apparatus, but the Pasadenans’ finest playing came in the score’s quietest passages, in the concluding “Neptune,” whose final moments were graced by the women’s voices of the Valley Master Chorale.

Still, at least one listener could be thankful that in 1916, when Holst completed his three-quarter-hour long heavenly perusal, Pluto (the planet) had not yet been discovered.