Music Reviews : L.B. Symphony Hosts Donald Johanos

Veteran conductor Donald Johanos proved a welcome guest Saturday night on the podium of the Long Beach Symphony’s seldom-absent music director, JoAnn Falletta.

The most impressive results came in the most familiar music in a truly distinguished account of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony. Leading the orchestra with compact but wonderfully expressive gestures, Johanos, music director of the Honolulu Symphony since 1979, crafted a fluid, carefully gauged drama, making his points with ease and restraint. The communication of stillness, and expectancy within it, was one of his specialties, which helped make, for instance, his lyrical, unexaggerated reading of the “Funeral March” greater than the sum of its parts.

The orchestra responded with assurance and neatness throughout; occasionally one wanted brighter woodwinds and more forceful strings.

Earlier, pianist Neil Rutman had revisited Prokofiev’s oft overlooked Second Piano Concerto. He showed himself well up to its considerable technical demands, projecting its pecky, impish music and acerbic rhapsody surely. Perhaps, however, he lacked that last iota of brashness required to make this score fly. The orchestra accompanied with impressive heft and color, but sometimes too heavily.

Also offered at the Terrace Theater concert was American composer Dan Welcher’s “Castle Creek”: Fanfare/Overture. Based on an ascending, major-key motive, the brief work is a bright, splashy, jagged, ostinato-driven curtain raiser, effective if typical of much that’s out there these days. Johanos and the orchestra played it with skillful spirit.