Music Reviews : Pasadena Symphony, Mester Open Season

The Pasadena Symphony Orchestra began its new season on Saturday with a flashily entertaining program, notable both for Jorge Mester’s bracing leadership and for a degree of orchestral polish seldom encountered within the party-like context of an opening night.

On display in Pasadena Civic Auditorium were the relatively obscure Suite in F-sharp minor of Ernst von Dohnanyi and the ever-welcome First Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich, enclosing the E-flat Piano Concerto of Liszt, disinterred as a vehicle for the unassuming virtuosity of Santiago Rodriguez.

The Suite is the work of a composer with multiple identities: most obviously those of Brahms (outtakes from his “Haydn” Variations), Richard Strauss, Dvorak, perhaps Bruckner (or is it Wagner?) and, most surprisingly, Mahler. If there’s a real Dohnanyi hiding down there at the bottom of the grab-bag, his personality doesn’t emerge.

But is it fun? You betcha. The tunes are pretty, the orchestration clever and it’s packed with solo opportunities for the orchestra principals, who executed their parts brilliantly.

Obeisance was paid to a dubious past with the Liszt Concerto, which at least had the advantages of brevity and Rodriguez’s easy command of its hoarily ponderous heroics.

The Shostakovich, on the other hand, emerged wonderfully fresh and cheeky in Mester’s spiffily dashing reading, his orchestra projecting the 19-year-old composer’s snotty wit with irresistible bravura.

Incidental intelligence: Mester cannily constructed this program to allow for the presence of the usually underemployed, underappreciated triangle in each of its three components. With two players, yet.

Jorge Mester is not only a fine conductor, he’s a mensch .