MUSIC REVIEW : Gnawing End to St.Clair’s Full Plate

Opening his fourth season as music director of the Pacific Symphony, Carl St.Clair offered a program Wednesday night consisting of a masterwork/test piece, the West Coast premiere of a 3-year-old symphonic essay to the text of “The Diary of Anne Frank” and a chestnut nicely roasted. Why, then, after this generous musical meal, did one leave the Orange County Performing Arts Center feeling less than full?

Perhaps it only was greed on our part. Certainly clean, well-motivated and consistently transparent performances of Beethoven’s Third “Leonore” Overture and Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony deserve admiration as well as respect, especially given that transparency has not been a longtime virtue of this ensemble.

Furthermore, the apparent outer beauties of Michael Tilson Thomas’ 41-minute meditation (with narrator) on the words of “Anne Frank” are considerable. They seem to have emotional substance and obviously touched a chord with an audience that came close to filling the hall. Read with sense, contrast and clarity by actress Kathy Bates, these words could not fail to register positively.

Yet . . . some hunger had not been satisfied when the evening ended.

Tilson Thomas’ radiant symphonic poem (for which he shares credit with Colin Matthews for orchestration of the piano score) is without a doubt brilliantly, perhaps even gaudily, colorful. It tugs at one’s emotions with sounds alternately Mahlerian, Bernsteinian, Coplandesque. If the idiom is not exactly a compendium of 20th-Century styles, it is a sampler of them, which is not to denigrate its effectiveness.

Still, it would not be too much to call this score cinematic, for it could not exist without the writer’s text as its core. Indeed, without the words, it would be an empty shell.

The performance had everything in its favor--not only Bates’ expert projection of the wide-ranging contents of feeling but also the Pacific Symphony’s many skills at producing contrasts, fine balances and beautifully articulated solo lines. St.Clair led his colleagues with great care and kaleidoscopic detailing. Every living composer should have an advocate this convincing.

In the surrounding works, the 41-year-old American conductor led with his usual persuasive enthusiasm and bravado. The “Leonore” Overture emerged dramatically taut and virtually immaculate. And if he found few new insights in the “New World” Symphony, St.Clair certainly coaxed his orchestra through a well-paced reading; its best moments came in the Largo, which seemed as deeply felt as it was softly spoken.