MUSIC REVIEW : Smith Leads Long Beach Symphony

An energetic but disciplined and enlightening conductor, Louisville Orchestra music director Lawrence Leighton Smith projected sheer joy in music-making when he led the Long Beach Symphony in a three-part program Saturday at the Terrace Theater.

Faced with the dense, grand and sometimes clotted rhetoric of Carl Nielsen’s Symphony No. 4 (“Inextinguishable”), Smith made a persuasive case that the life force is neither raw power nor vigorous rhythm but an irresistible gathering of sweetness and warmth.

The orchestra mustered bold if not always rich fortissimos, and tore through the composer’s manic demands on the strings with verve and accuracy. For all that, the meandering architecture made for only intermittent delights.

In Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8, Smith favored muscular lyricism, explored byways of darkness and drama, and overall revealed an unfamiliar degree of autumnal clarity and certainty. The orchestra responded with solid and unified playing.

Smith brought the same degree of involvement and commitment to Augusta Read Thomas’ “Wind Dance,” a 17-minute work written in 1989. A first hearing did little to reveal the tight structure averred by the now 27-year-old composer. Instead, the work seemed vaguely impressionistic, a hybrid of Respighi and Webern.