MUSIC REVIEW : Cerritos Hall Showcases S.F. Symphony

Conjunctions of orchestras and halls, like the conjunctions of stars, can sometimes produce deep and lasting effects.

The first encounter between the new (since January) Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts and the San Francisco Symphony, for instance. It happened Tuesday night, at the orchestra’s second stop of a five-city California tour, and it promises much for the future, even though the hall, reportedly having undergone some acoustical reconfiguring during the summer, remains a better purveyor of loudness than a user-friendly haven for soft-playing.

Nevertheless, the San Francisco orchestra sounded quite wonderful in the auditorium--not always as mellow as ideal, yet consistently brilliant, blended and accomplished.

Under its present music director, Herbert Blomstedt--now in the eighth season of a 10-year tenure (he is scheduled to depart in 1995)--the Symphony gave a showy and pleasant performance of an old-fashioned program in the commodious, 1,626-seat (on this occasion) hall. That agenda comprised Smetana’s very familiar “Moldau,” Janacek’s largely unfamiliar “Taras Bulba” and the Seventh Symphony of Dvorak, a piece also offered on the orchestra’s last visit here, in 1990.

The older Czech composer’s D-minor Symphony, which closed the program, does not sprawl, but has been known to do so, under flaccid leadership. Blomstedt, without over-aggression, gave it a continuity that flowed. His players provided polish, firm balances, strong solo lines and the proud confidence of a world-class ensemble, which this orchestra has not always been.

In his orchestral rhapsody, “Taras Bulba,” Janacek indulges a perfervid musical imagination and hyperkinetic instrumental writing that threatens to wear the listener out long before the three-movement piece ends. If this were prose, we would call it purple. As music, it deserves the description gaudy.

Blomstedt & Co. gave it clear definition, unflagging balances and usually controlled loud playing, but incomplete dramatic projection. The best storytellers persuade through their own belief in the tale; the impression here was that the narrators, so careful and successful in note-spinning, stopped short of genuine belief.

At the beginning of the evening, “The Moldau” showed the orchestra’s strengths in mid- and low-range dynamics and a compelling sense of line. At the end, real raucousness characterized the single encore, Dvorak’s Eighth Slavonic Dance.