MUSIC REVIEWS : Falletta Nimbly Leads L.B. Symphony

It may be a fool’s errand to quarrel with JoAnn Falletta’s Bruckner. The Long Beach Symphony music director led an intelligent, coherent account of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony--no mean feat in itself--on Saturday at the Terrace Theater, along with works by Rossini and Adolphus Hailstork.

She kept textures in the Ninth clean and clear, maintained a fine sense of balance in the brass-heavy work, yet did not stint on the massive climaxes. She found warmth, nobility and human dimensions in the score, qualities not always emphasized.

What she did not find was the numinous, the metaphysical, the strangeness of the music that seems to arrive from another, not always hospitable, often indifferent world. The composer was dying as he wrote it. He was not able to complete the fourth movement, so it ends with the third. Without the incipient terror and struggle in all that, the final reconciliation loses impact.

Falletta conducted the 1992 premiere of Hailstork’s Piano Concerto, played then in Virginia as here by the fiercely talented and powerful Leon Bates. A nimble, eclectic work of three movements that incorporates elements of jazz, Bartok and Prokofiev, the music nevertheless does not sound derivative.

Indeed, in the lyric theme of the second movement--which, the composer wrote, generated the entire piece--Hailstork has penned a memorable and touching melody that should warrant more performances of the work. The outer movements are more problematic. Hailstork was on hand to take bows.

Falletta opened the program with a bright, stylish and witty reading of the Overture to Rossini’s “Il Barbiere di Siviglia.”