MUSIC REVIEW : Pacific Symphony Maintains Its Standards

Second programs, like second performances, sometimes fall short. It would have been difficult to surpass the most recent local appearance of cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who as soloist opened the Pacific Symphony season last month. But, as music director Carl St.Clair and soloist Stephen Prutsman showed Wednesday night, it is still possible to maintain standards.

St.Clair, continuing his fifth year at the helm of the orchestra, and Prutsman, replacing on short notice an ailing pianistic colleague, found a comparable excitement in the contrasting agenda of William Bolcom’s “Commedia,” Beethoven’s C-minor Concerto and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 for the first of two performances at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

The “Pathetique” Symphony both challenges and exposes an orchestra; it can achieve glory or merely bravado. At the end of a generous evening, St.Clair & Company found its depth, its brilliance and its emotional resonance.

The orchestra’s accomplished and virtuosic upper strings put on display their higher level of mechanical skills while giving the conductor admirable Tchaikovskian lushness; the brass and woodwinds matched their instrumental brightness with a complementary mellowness.

And St.Clair this time took care to hone in and shape only one musical catharsis per movement. That strategy paid off: This was a handsome, deeply satisfying performance that balanced emotional intensity and orchestral transparency.

Prutsman, substituting for Anatol Ugorski, made Beethoven’s Third Concerto all his own in a reading of Classic style, tight rhetoric and flawless technique.

There are certainly more dramatic ways to approach this work, but Prutsman’s gentle restraint, lyric shaping of the longer line, purling trills and solid finger-work proved eminently persuasive. Now we want to hear the Los Angeles-born pianist, in the past decade winner of major international competitions, in Chopin.

By way of overture, St.Clair chose the self-conscious wit of Bolcom’s “Commedia (for ‘Almost’ 18th-Century Orchestra)” to show off a reduced orchestra, and conducted it with affection.