MUSIC REVIEW : Universal Language of ‘Planets’ Enhances Pictures

The Pacific Symphony concert Wednesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center was an interesting hybrid that forces consideration under a different kind of rubric than usual.

The first half was pure music, with Christopher Seaman leading the orchestra in Berlioz’s “Roman Carnival” Overture and Tchaikovsky’s “Rococo” Variations, with cellist Bion Tsang as soloist.

Nothing new there, although Seaman worked some real magic, given the major handicap he was handed: About 20 regular section leaders and others are touring Japan as members of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra.

Additionally, Tsang--pardon the pun--sang with small-scaled but fervent eloquence.

The new breed came after intermission, as Seaman led Holst’s “The Planets” to a visual adaptation by Marc Jacobs, a British-born stage director who has lived in Los Angeles for 16 years.

Jacobs’ contribution consisted of some 450 slides sequentially projected onto two 9-by-12-foot screens (one horizontal, one vertical) that floated above each side of the orchestra. Rarely did the same pictures, taken from NASA satellites or just from Life magazine-type portfolios, appear on both screens at the same time or with the same pacing.

In concept and execution, the results proved neither simplistic nor inevitable, though occasionally predictable. The images did not often illuminate the music, but the music did enhance the pictures, which had both intrinsic and cumulative impact.

In “Mars, The Bringer of War,” the images ranged from the fall of Troy to Hitler and the Nazis to Vietnam and the post-Vietnam era and led to a buildup of Swiftian nausea and disgust that was alleviated only three sections later, in the smiles of ordinary people, the newspaper headlines of Peace in Europe, the picture of Louis Armstrong playing trumpet--all in “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity.”

At times, however, because of the stage lighting, the slides could not be clearly seen nor understood. Sometimes the connections to the music appeared arbitrary, dubious or weird.

Generally, Seaman conducted the difficult score with self-effacing, no-nonsense, straightforward control, enhancing the impression that the music was an accompaniment to the visuals rather than the other way around or even in equal partnership with them.

Still, he got the orchestra to play consistently with point and musical purpose, and, even if there was a sense of strain and reaching, it was reaching in the right direction.

The excellent offstage chorus consisted of the women of the Pacific Chorale.

To open the program, Seaman, who was once a candidate for the music director position and twice before a guest conductor with this orchestra, led a tight, intelligent account of the Berlioz overture.

Playing a Giovanni Grancino cello made in Milan in 1705, Tsang, 25, proved an honest, committed soloist, forcing neither the tone, the music, nor his Tchaikovsky interpretation.