MUSIC REVIEW : A Raucous Concert at Cerritos Center : The St. Louis Symphony encounters some acoustical problems in our newest arts emporium.

It looks as if there may be some trouble in Southern California’s newest cultural paradise. It certainly sounds that way.

Tuesday night, the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts ventured its first orchestral concert, with a lot of help from the St. Louis Symphony. Leonard Slatkin, a Los Angeles native, manned the podium, and Nina Bodnar, formerly of Santa Barbara, temporarily abandoned the concertmaster’s desk to serve as soloist.

The multipurpose hall--always a dangerous concept--was set up in a modification of what the architects call “lyric configuration.” That means the stage was moved to its conventional position, but some patrons were stationed in tiers above and behind the playing area. (To a viewer out front, they looked for all the world like passengers on the decks of a cruise ship; one kept waiting for them to throw confetti and wave goodby.)

The audience, we are told, could have numbered 1,550 on this occasion. That is half the capacity of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Tickets prices ranged from $25 to $35. But there were quite a few empty seats. Friendly spies, always reasonably treasonable, reported that the management had dabbled in the generous old art of “papering”--issuing freebies, that is.

It didn’t bode well for the arts in Cerritos.

The good news on Tuesday involved intimacy and immediacy. It was refreshing to get close to an orchestra, for a change, and satisfying to hear big music in a relatively little place.

The bad news involved the acoustics. When the orchestra played softly, and it didn’t do so very often, the tone was clear, focused and resonant. When the orchestra didn’t play softly, the tone became fuzzy, raucous and strident.

It takes time to tune a hall, and some adjustments will no doubt be possible. Still, one worries about the limitations imposed by an open structure that may preclude the use of a shell or reflecting panels.

In Cerritos, loud is very loud indeed. Vibrancy is in plentiful supply. Mellowness seems an endangered commodity.

Under the circumstances, it was difficult to separate intentions from achievements in the music-making. Slatkin is certainly not an insensitive conductor, and the St. Louis Symphony is certainly not a beat-’em-over-the-head orchestra. But, from an uncomfortably narrow seat at midpoint downstairs, nearly everything sounded surprisingly rough and distressingly tough.

The ultra-conservative program opened with Berlioz’s “Roman Carnival” overture, even though the early ads had heralded “Overture to ‘The Flying Dutchman’ ” (composer apparently unknown). Slatkin seemed to stress impetuous prose over delicate poetry, but in this instance it couldn’t matter much.

The centerpiece turned out to be the D-major Violin Concerto of Tchaikovsky (the early ads had kept his name a tantalizing secret). Bodnar played with broad, tasteful, efficient, almost mechanical competence. If she has strong interpretive ideas about the old romantic warhorse, she kept them to herself. Slatkin and the orchestra provided dutiful support, little inspiration.

After intermission, Bodnar changed to black mufti and returned to her accustomed place within the orchestral ranks for Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony in A, Opus 92 (the silly ad had promised somebody-or-other’s Symphony No. 5 in B-flat, Opus 100). With Slatkin stressing dull essentials uber Alles , this was a great night for speed, not a great night for subtlety.

The Cerritos audience, ever enthusiastic, mustered especially appreciative applause after the funereal Allegretto.

The welcome, voluminous program notes revealed, incidentally, that the last Beethoven specialist to conduct this daunting symphony in St. Louis was no less a maestro than Bobby McFerrin. Now that might have been interesting.