New Kraft Work, Shostakovich 5th Outdoors With Pacific Symphony

A brand-new work by a living American composer, a terrific new pianist from the East Coast and a satisfying infusion of Shostakovich: Happy surprises marked the third outdoor concert of the Pacific Symphony’s summer season at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre, Saturday night.

Another, unexpected novelty: When the prerecorded announcement at the top of the evening welcomed concert-goers, the familiar voice making the greeting belonged, not to an Orange County denizen, but to another American composer of repute: David Raksin, the creator of “Laura,” the song, and countless, subsequent film, as well as concert, scores.

Carl St.Clair presided over these performances in which not all his regular Pacific Symphony principals participated--some of them were otherwise engaged at a long weekend of Hollywood Bowl Orchestra gigs. The band at Irvine, however, played gamely, in some moments splendidly, in response to their music director’s urgings.

Most splendid: Shostakovich’s deservedly popular Fifth Symphony, which St.Clair revived with a probing alertness, genuine sensitivity and an ear to its long-lined beauties.

By this time (the concert’s second half), the microphone/amplification/broadcast system had been adjusted toward a credible aural reality and the orchestra outdoors sounded not unlike itself, indoors.

William Kraft’s “Gossamer Glances,” a seven-minute overture contrasting lacy instrumental business with occasional violent outbursts, was written on a commission from the Assn. of California Symphony Orchestras (ACSO).

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The new work can boast many charms, the main one being that it does not try to be charming but to make engrossing music with the full resources of a symphonic apparatus. This it succeeds in from top to bottom. St.Clair brought to it his usual exuberance and exact sense of detailing. The orchestra played as if it knew the score, an achievement, at first performances, rare enough.

Playing Rachmaninoff’s “Paganini” Rhapsody at mid-program, Benjamin Pasternack, the American pianist who now teaches at Boston University and who had made his local debut last fall with this orchestra, here repeated his reported success.

Pasternack’s breezily virtuosic playing of the Rhapsody had power, technique to spare, fleetness and an apparently rich coloristic spectrum. If the actual width of that spectrum seemed in doubt, blame the instrument on which he played, a brittle-sounding, hard-edged and limited Yamaha piano.