MUSIC REVIEW : St.Clair Rescales Mussorgsky’s ‘Mountain’

Orange County may be financially bankrupt, but the local arts organizations--never much dependent on governmental largess in this bastion of conservative culture--remain essentially unaffected. So far.

Wednesday night it was business as usual at the crowded Performing Arts Center, where Carl St.Clair led his ever-responsive Pacific Symphony in a tough and taut program of Russian music. Everyone seemed happy. No one passed a hat.

The evening began with the gusty thrust of Shostakovich’s “Festival Overture,” written in 1954 to commemorate the 37th anniversary of the Soviet Revolution. The evening ended with the picturesque theatrics of Stravinsky’s “Firebird”--the suite, thank goodness, not the whole ballet score. At concerto time, violinist Robert McDuffie surveyed the passion and poetry of the Prokofiev Second, finding the latter element more rewarding than the former.

The central attraction turned out to be Mussorgsky’s--well, sort-of Mussorgsky’s--macabre “Night on Bald Mountain.” The inspired composer, technically something of a primitive, left no definitive version of his symphonic fantasy for posterity. This has prompted numerous helping hands to muck about with the orchestration.

Rimsky-Korsakov provided the lush, so-called standard version, but most musicologists now question its fidelity to the composer’s rough and unready intentions. Leopold Stokowski provided his own Technicolored revision for “Fantasia,” and other orchestral editions have been provided by Vissarion Shebalin, Rene Leibowitz and Gottfried von Einem. The current record catalogue lists at least two CD mementos of Mussorgky’s “original version,” not to mention Alan Wiltshire’s arrangement for brass and percussion.

In the bad old days, it was generally felt that the composer needed all the boosting he could get. Charles O’Connell put it quaintly in “The Victor Book of Overtures, Tone Poems and Other Orchestral Works.” “Mussorgsky,” he wrote, “was so vacillating in his original conception of this music, and at times thought of inserting such fantastically unreasonable ideas, that the suspicion arises he may have been under the influence of drugs (as he often was) when he wrote.”

Goodness gracious.

Mussorgsky’s muse was protected on Wednesday by Daniel Lochrie, a clarinetist with the Nashville Symphony who chose “A Night on Bald Mountain” as the subject of his doctoral thesis at Ohio State. The resulting reconstruction, which was receiving its first performance on this occasion, is well crafted, lucid and scholarly. It incorporates relatively unfamiliar melodic material here and there (including a mushy cello chorale at the end), avoids slam-dunk repetitions and restores harmonic clashes that Rimsky may have found too progressive (or may have deemed mistakes).

The revelations aren’t exactly earth-shattering. Given the perverse vagaries of authenticity, Lochrie’s work cannot be called definitive. Most of the time it sounds doggedly familiar. Still, it is bright, reasonably brash, historically sound and perfectly effective on its own limited terms. That should be enough for the moment.

Lochrie, incidentally, was not present to take a bow at the premiere. According to reliable sources, he was home playing in the pit for a “Nutcracker” gig. ‘Tis the season. . . .

St.Clair and his charges scaled the “Bald Mountain” with imposing bravado, even if they could only approximate the granitic force we have come to expect from a bona- fide Russian orchestra. They mustered plenty of festive pizazz on behalf of Shostakovich and the triumph of communism, and they lavished all manner of romantic indulgence (perhaps a bit too much) on Stravinsky’s incendiary fowl.

McDuffie, the Prokofiev protagonist, projected restrained ardor in the dark allegro of the G-minor Concerto, and made an exquisite reverie of the long-lined andante. Although he missed some of the wild bravura one wants in the rondo finale, his taste and technique were never in question.

For an anachronistic encore, the visiting virtuoso added “Amazing Grace,” solo. Ask not why.