MUSIC REVIEW : Carl St. Clair Turns Up Volume on Tchaikovsky : Though the conductor directs with care, subtlety is definitely not the name of the game in the Pacific’s presentation of Symphony No. 4 at the Center.

Demanding dynamics approaching rock-concert levels, Pacific Symphony music director Carl St. Clair brought Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 to a ringing close Wednesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

The problem was, the noise kept ringing in at least one person’s ears out the door, down the street, to the parking lot and into the damp night beyond.

Subtlety was not the name of St. Clair’s game as he addressed the worthy warhorse that closed a program that also included Christopher Rouse’s “The Infernal Machine” and Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5, with soloist Joshua Bell.

Whether Tchaikovsky can be considered a subtle composer may be open to debate, but certainly he wrote with more Slavic or Russian soul than this performance elicited.

St. Clair directed with care and deliberation, but with few interpretive ideas. He tended to shape the start of phrases, then turn his attention to matters of tempo and coherence.

Whether this shift is necessary at this stage of the ensemble’s development is unclear. But the results were a generalized, unprobing account of the music.

The orchestra offered heavy, blocky but unified sectional response. Still, the audience loved it, and broke into applause even before the final chord was finished.

At least the triple fortes gave evidence that the sound-decay time in Segerstrom Hall, far from being ideal, is in certain instances about nil.

In place of his more familiar guitar-shaped 1726 Stradivarius, Bell was trying out a 1732 Stradivari violin (the “Tom Taylor”), which he acquired about three weeks ago, according to an orchestra spokesman.

Under the circumstances, the results could not be considered the 23-year-old violinist’s currently final thoughts on the work. He played with sweet, bright, edge-less tone but also a misapplied Romanticized style. He was obviously making choices in phrasing and dynamics, but they didn’t add up to any expressive insights.

Bell also played his own cadenzas, adapted from those by Joachim. The adaptations did not prove very musical, however, and tended to rely upon 19th-Century stylistic mannerisms.

St. Clair accompanied closely, seemingly a difficult proposition at times, but he also kept the orchestra from becoming a full partner in Mozart’s deliberations.

The audience restrained itself from applauding between movements but nonetheless unleashed such a barrage of coughs and throat-clearings that the auditorium sounded at these times as if it were a sanitarium for respiratory ailments. Inappropriate applause might have been less disruptive.

St. Clair had opened the program by talking about Rouse’s “Infernal Machine” with eagerness and giving snippet samplings to ease the audience into what is all of a five-minute challenge composed in 1981. The orchestra played the spunky moto perpetuo with low-octane drive and verve.