MUSIC REVIEW : Pacific Symphony, St.Clair Open New Season Rousingly

The ghost of Leonard Bernstein--who died two years and two days ago--hangs over many musical places, not least over the podium at the Orange County-based Pacific Symphony, where Bernstein’s protege, Carl St.Clair, presides as music director.

Now 40, and beginning his third season with the Pacific ensemble, St.Clair sometimes puts together programs of remarkable symmetry and musical sense.

He did so again, with the first agenda of his 1992-93 season in Costa Mesa: It began with Bernstein’s brief but touching “Benediction”--starting the year with a prayer is not a bad strategy for any symphony orchestra, these days--crested on Mozart’s Piano Concerto in G, K. 453, and reached its climax in Mahler’s First Symphony.

Not only did the program work, the performances sang.

The Pacific Symphony has never been a model of consistent instrumentalism. In this decade and a half, one has heard it rise to many occasions, fall on its face a few times, and operate at a mediocre level too often.

Wednesday night, in Segerstrom Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center (a repeat was scheduled Thursday), the orchestra played as well, as tightly and with as much esprit de corps as one has encountered in its performances.

Mahler’s myriad instrumental challenges and the need to keep them in balance seemed to bring out the best in the youngish players--a number of whom looked new, but hardly inexperienced, on the job. A spokesman for the orchestra’s management tells us that this fall there are nine new string players, including the principal cellist, three violists and five violinists. At this point, the new additions seem positive.

The brass, usually a problematic choir in this orchestra--as in many others, of course--played with that rare combination of brightness and understatement, never aurally clobbered their colleagues and kept all their rhetoric within the musical line.

The strings shone, from within and without, and ascended all rising phrases fearlessly. Especially admirable were the violas, who achieved an effortless, post-Romantic glow in their exposed passages. And the excellence of the Pacific woodwinds continues to encourage the optimistic observer.

Most successfully, St.Clair provided his colleagues with an overall Mahlerian framework of well-reasoned and apprehensible music-making within which to work.

As a result, most of the details were in place, and polished, and the performance moved, climactically, in a straight line, upward. Even the famous longueurs of the third movement, where conductors and orchestra can fall victim to inattention, did not slow down St.Clair’s vitality and momentum (despite serious competition from a gang of coughers spread through the audience). A touching performance.

Appropriately, it was preceded by readings on the same order of alertness and affection.

At mid-program, the Irish thinker-pianist, John O’Conor, still more familiar from his recordings than from personal visits to our shores, returned to Orange County to give a memorable, immaculate and probing account of Mozart’s K. 453, one teeming with felicitous details but unprecious in the extreme.

Here, simplicity reigned, the simplicity of high artistic achievement, warm rapport between soloist and orchestra and conductor, and a direct approach to musical goals. Now 45, O’Conor represents the emerging middle generation of important international pianists whose ideals combine the best aspects of tone and thought.

At the beginning, Bernstein’s six-minute “Benediction,” for tenor and orchestra, a heartfelt movement the composer used in a number of works in the last years of his life, created that spiritual context maintained thereafter in the evening.

Meir Finkelstein was the pure-toned, unprepossessing but effective soloist. First trumpet Burnette Dillon made similarly cherishable contributions.