MUSIC REVIEW : Pacific Plays Takemitsu and Beethoven : It was the Western Classical standby Third Symphony that rocked the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Thursday night.

Although Thursday night’s Pacific Symphony concert featured the West Coast premiere of Toru Takemitsu’s “From me flows what you call Time,” it was the orchestra’s startling performance of an old standby that really rocked the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

After intermission, St. Clair and the orchestra returned to the Western Classical repertory with a performance of Beethoven’s Third Symphony (“Eroica”) that featured spectacularly daring French horns, meltingly beautiful oboe work by Barbara Northcutt, and the orchestra’s eight double basses ranged imposingly across the back of the stage for added resonance.

The first movement, swift and elegant but too controlled, gave little indication of the excitement to come. In the second “Funeral March” movement, however, St. Clair began letting go. With the strings painfully sensitive to the gorgeous melodies and handling the big fugue in the middle with amazing power and variety, and with the woodwinds and brass playing for all they were worth, there wasn’t much of Beethoven’s emotional power and musical glory that they missed.

St. Clair’s was an unusually wholesome approach, lacking those massive tempo changes and dark, brooding instrumental colors that to some convey the ultimate in Beethovenian Angst, but it made a wonderfully exciting impression as he and the orchestra succeeded in harnessing and streamlining the music’s punch and power. Accordingly and appropriately, they just made it to the finish together in the finale.

Takemitsu’s colorful 30-minute work--commissioned by Carnegie Hall for performance during its 1990 centennial by the five-man Canadian percussion group Nexus and the Boston Symphony--held interest from beginning to end. Nexus, in town for the premiere and positioned at five stands surrounding the orchestra, created a vivid musical picture with its dazzling array of instruments including glockenspiel, vibraphone, xylophone, Japanese temple bowls, Chinese and Thai gongs, Turkish drums, rain stick, tom-toms, tam-tams and timpani.

Intensifying the musical imagery, the members of Nexus entered theatrically from the audience, dressed in black like priests and ringing hand chimes, after the orchestra was already playing, while white, blue, yellow, red and green streamers reached from the stage to large chimes hanging in the first balcony.

Taking his title from a contemporary poem by Makoto Ooka and his spiritual inspiration from Tibetan ritual, Takemitsu used the orchestra to provide simple, usually tonal ambience and the percussion to create accents ranging from impressionistically ambiguous to loudly exuberant. The most effective moments were those for percussion alone, however, such as halfway through when a pretty gong cadenza was followed by a plangent steel drum riff echoed eerily by muffled wood blocks. At the end, the balcony chimes died away as the double basses played a long, deep note. It was a lovely time as music and silence slowly merged.