MUSIC REVIEW : Pathos and Pizazz in Long Beach : Conductor JoAnn Falletta has the right stuff--a compelling presence and interesting programs--to pack Long Beach Terrace Theater.

JoAnn Falletta seems to have found the right formula for the Long Beach Symphony.

She puts together interesting, reasonably adventurous programs and packs the cavernous Terrace Theater with conspicuously admiring subscribers for seven carefully spaced concerts each season. All this and pops extravaganzas too.

She has at her command a collection of 85 top-notch musicians, more than half of them women. Many free-lance players who are drawn to the Los Angeles area for lucrative studio work relish the opportunity to play some real music once in a while. Our so-called regional orchestras are the lucky beneficiaries.

The Long Beach Symphony doesn’t sound much like a pick-up ensemble, however. Falletta, now completing her fourth year as music director, seems to know how to create unity amid diversity. She is a compelling presence on the podium.

By the way, call her maestro. With an o. Maestra is grammatically correct, but, we are told, Falletta isn’t comfortable with the label. Perhaps it isn’t politically correct.

Chic in a black spangly-silky pantsuit, the maestro presided Saturday night over an agenda that offered two samples of painless musical Americana as a prelude to some soulful-slushpump exercises courtesy of Tchaikovsky.

The centerpiece turned out to be the 53-year-old Violin Concerto of Samuel Barber, not heard around here since the Pacific Symphony played it 10 days ago,17 miles away. Our performing institutions obviously don’t deem it worthwhile to synchronize their schedules.

The stellar soloist in Long Beach was to have been Nadja Solerno-Sonnenberg.

When illness reportedly forced her to withdraw, Long Beach managed to engage another stellar soloist equally celebrated in this demanding challenge: Elmar Oliveira.

Anne Akkiko Meyers, who had been the Barberian protagonist in Orange County, stressed introspection and restraint at the expense of bravura passion. Oliveira did the opposite.

And he did so brilliantly--sighing with heroic vigor in the two lyrical movements, roaring with fearless rapture as well as breathless accuracy through the convolutions of the moto perpetuo finale. The performance was dauntlessly elegant, even in its pyrotechnical indulgences.

Falletta defined both moods and tempos sympathetically. She did tend, however, to allow the orchestra to blanket the fiddle when agitation beckoned.

The sophisticated Long Beach audience, unlike its Costa Mesa counterpart, paid the composer and performers the compliment of rapt silence between movements. Wild applause at the end was enough.

The evening began with Walter Piston’s once-popular ballet score, “The Incredible Flutist” (1938-1940), an amusing, well-crafted compendium of mellifluous cliches and pizazz gimmicks. Falletta affectionately pulled out the period stops for the cutesy-raucous circus march--which had members of the orchestra waving tiny American flags, blowing party-favor whistles, shouting on cue and barking like a chorus of dogs, when not otherwise employed.

The big symphonic test came after intermission with Tchaikovsky’s overworked “Pathetique.” Falletta beat time expansively, refusing to shrink from the leisurely romantic sentiment. Her responsive orchestra luxuriated in the thick textures and made much of the whomping climaxes.

The performance was affecting, in a broad, generalized, superficial way. Unfortunately, it paid little attention to the dynamic nuances and subtle details that ultimately make the difference between pathos and bathos.