MUSIC REVIEWS : Saint Louis Symphony Returns on Higher Level

Wonderful things can happen when orchestras go on tour: Given less than a handful of programs to play, and the opportunity to perform them numerous times, plus the salubrious condition of being unfettered by normal daily routines, symphonic players sometimes do their best work in concerts on the road.

Which is not to say that the touring Saint Louis Symphony, appearing five times in Southern California this week--the last time Tuesday at the new Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts--played over its head at its Saturday night concert at Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena. It merely played impressively well.

And, clearly, on a higher level of achievement than on its last visit here, 4 1/2 years ago.

Now in his 14th season as music director, Leonard Slatkin has brought his Missourians to a new plateau. This splendid, now-major American orchestra plays with an abundance of colorful instrumental resources, first-rate soloism and the makings of genuine finesse.

The live Ambassador hall projected every sound of the orchestra, including its less polished ones, directly into the audience, just as it has done for all the visiting symphonic bodies, provincial or international, who have performed here in the facility’s first 19 years.

Without unfairly comparing Saint Louis to some of those major-major orchestras from Berlin, Amsterdam and Philadelphia heard here during two decades, one can say that its soft-end dynamics remain less than fully developed, though its plush, lush string sound is already under firm control.

The middle-of-the-road 20th-Century program given Saturday (another agenda was scheduled for Sunday afternoon at Ambassador, a third for Cerritos, Tuesday) gave the Saint Louisans and their American conductor a great chance for display. They made the most of it.

Showiest was the centerpiece, Dohnanyi’s post-Romantic Suite in F-sharp minor, as gorgeous and treacly a work of orchestral music as this century has produced. Under Slatkin’s unabashed, if not over-demonstrative, ministrations, the 83-year-old piece exerted all its fierce and irresistible charms: soaring melodies, resplendent instrumental writing, masterly and extended climaxes.

Similar aural joys materialized in the program-closer, Prokofiev’s popular and bombastic Fifth Symphony. As sometimes happens, the two final movements seemed to suffer from unexpected longueurs , a condition probably built-in, rather than tacked-on.

Exuberance marked the beginning and end of this satisfying evening. At the start, the orchestra’s strings gave a most handsome demonstration of their best work in Vaughan Williams’ Five Variants of “Dives and Lazarus.” And, at the end, there was an encore in Copland’s Hoedown from “Rodeo.”