MUSIC REVIEW : Long Beach Symphony in a Solid, Safe Program

Embers from the ’93 fires are being quenched, and all was relatively calm and well in Long Beach on Saturday, where the Long Beach Symphony convened for its second concert of the season. Perhaps fittingly, the program--Brahms, Hanson and Strauss, R.--was more comforting than challenging, turning the Terrace Theater into a romantic and post-romantic safety zone.

Now in her fifth year at the helm, Music Director JoAnn Falletta sculpts spacious, clear gestures in the air, and generally favors clarity over excessive emoting. The orchestra responds keenly, with a reliable expressivity.

It brought controlled gusto to Brahms’ “Academic Festival” Overture, which still conveys more emotional integrity than one might expect from a piece based on college songs.

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Overall, this is an orchestra that forsakes neither grandiose textural weaves or fine detail work in the fabric. Still, things got a bit shaky--some raggedness in the horns, slight lapses of focus--during Howard Hanson’s “Romantic” Symphony (1930). The instinct of Hanson’s title goes both ways, sometimes serving deep and surging ends, and sometimes coaxing little more than syrupy cliches that have since found a home in the syntax of movie scores.

Leave it to Strauss to save the evening. The orchestra triumphed in its reading of the tone poem “Don Quixote,” with its intrigue, vitality and, thanks be, healthy doses of paradox. John Walz, cello, and Kazi Pitelka, viola, advanced from their respective places in the orchestral ranks to the solo spots, which they handled assuredly.

Falletta & Co. rose to the challenge of a mercurial score that leaps from the rhapsodic to the satirical, from thick to thin, from restive tonalities to the tranquil benediction of its finale, without betraying a beat.

In a word, they were affectingly quixotic.