MUSIC REVIEWS : A Firmly Seated Performance

Certain works in the orchestral repertory, it is fair to say, have standing ovations built in: Their energy, drama, pacing and brilliance will almost necessarily bring an audience to its feet upon the conclusion of a successful performance. Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony is such a work, as is Ravel’s orchestration of “Pictures at an Exhibition.”

So is Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony. There is nothing subtle about it--and nothing wrong with that. Its emotions are clear and powerful, its struggles obvious, its denouement loud and triumphant. When an audience stays seated after Shostakovich’s Fifth, either it missed the point or the orchestra failed to make it.

A performance of that familiar work concluded the South Coast Symphony’s season Saturday night in the Irvine Barclay Theatre--and it was greeted with polite, though warm and firmly seated applause.

Of course, criticism cannot be done by poll. For this listener then, the performance seemed competent and secure in matters of execution, balance and intonation, and conductor John Larry Granger laid out the score surely and clearly, if in a rather businesslike fashion.

But this is music of cruel orchestral brilliance, in which measured sounds don’t have a place. It calls for bluntness of attack and harshness of color, the blatancy of a black-and-white Soviet documentary, the kind of stark phrasing that suggests the cold expanses of a Siberian gulag. Granger and orchestra only momentarily hinted at such things.

Brass entrances proved consistently tentative, and the trumpets and horns refused to launch themselves into the lead. The strings were solid, but lacked timbral edge, technical abandon and etherealness when called for. The woodwinds only occasionally mustered the full-throated shrillness required and the percussion stayed, for the most part, merely supportive. In other words--stylistically, this performance fell short.

In the hands of New York Philharmonic concertmaster Glenn Dicterow, Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto remained earthbound as well. From a technical standpoint, of course, he was up to the challenge. But his musical steps were deliberate and his lyricism studied, his virtuosity and lightheartedness staid. With a surprisingly wide vibrato, Dicterow projected little swells in line and emotional hillocks all too obviously--he overprojected them. The orchestra supported ably, though it covered the soloist on occasion.

To open the concert, Granger and orchestra offered a novelty, George Walker’s Lyric for Strings, with the 69-year-old composer on hand. This gentle and lush, initially somber, warmly lyrical seven-minute work, in a Romantic idiom, received a well-shaped and spacious reading.