MUSIC REVIEW : Mom, Apple Pie, ‘Stars and Stripes’: Give ‘Em a Hand

Assistant conductor Edward Cumming led the opening concert of the Pacific Symphony’s 1995 summer series with the same good humor and ease that has marked his work with Orange County youth.

Given his position as director of the Pacific Symphony Institute Orchestra at Cal State Fullerton and, more particularly, his amiable instruction on the podium for the orchestra’s Musical Mornings children’s series, it seemed especially appropriate that he take the helm for this family-and-apple-pie concert Saturday night at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre.

It was as if his class had been recessed, and the families gathered for Fourth of July festivities. Cumming presided over a hummable evening of Gershwin, Bernstein, and Rodgers and Hammerstein, topping it off with a medley of Sousa marches made all the more bombastic by elaborate fireworks.

The musicians played with the enthusiasm--and electronically augmented, minimally varied volume--of a first-night pit band. They were, after all, running through a program titled “Stars and Stripes on Broadway.”

Before selections from Bernstein’s “Fancy Free,” the conductor gave his audience permission to applaud between movements, a formal blessing to a right that Orange County has long seized for itself anyway. His listeners did better than that, however: They clapped lustily at any pause. There were also standing ovations for all soloists--even those (soprano Dale Kristien and baritone Byron Nease) who had exited to silence when the length of the stage outdistanced the length of the applause. But when Cumming brought them back for an immediate encore, the singers delivered the expected numbers, the ones with which they had made their mark--two songs from “Phantom of the Opera.”

As Laurey and Curley in their “Oklahoma” selections, they may have been too slick (especially in comparison to the homespun accompaniment of the South Shores Choir), but as Raoul and Christine in “Phantom,” Kristien’s high warble could impress with its flexibility and power, alongside Nease’s rich baritone.

Pianist John Novacek received similar foot-stomping plaudits for his “Rhapsody in Blue.” He handled technical demands without flash, but with solidity. And though he allowed himself few bluesy tempo liberties, he painted plenty of clear, rhythmically strict and often quietly sensual passages, sometimes in a losing competition with the chorus of frogs on the green.