Program Jazzed Up by Quartet

Music director Carl St.Clair described the second half of the Pacific Symphony concert Wednesday night as an effort to break down the invisible barrier between stage and audience. He was referring to the inclusion of the Turtle Island String Quartet--an eclectic jazz foursome that is equally at home on the classical front--on the program at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

The comment wasn’t entirely necessary, as St.Clair just had led his players in a taut, evocative reading of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the “Pastorale.”

Everywhere in this fresh-faced performance, they conveyed unhurried, clean-lined robustness, a luxuriant tuneful quality and detail-oriented phrasing. Except for some overly extroverted twittering on the part of the violins during “By the Brook”--the second movement, led by guest concertmaster Igor Gruppman--translucent balance pervaded the work. The level of communication transcended any gulf between performers and listeners.

The wedding of jazz and classical idioms kept the lines of communication open. Most intriguing in this effort, Jeff Beal’s “Interchange” (1993) used the orchestra as an orchestra--not as a full-sized symphonic organization impersonating a jazz band. The effective four-movement piece contrasted rural and city life through a duality of musical genres.

Sometimes as soloists, sometimes as orchestral equals, the quartet members--violinists Darol Anger and Tracy Silverman, violist Danny Seidenberg and cellist Mark Summer--attacked their increasingly improvisational parts with virtuosic ease, whether drawing amplified, bluesy solos over static symphonic backing or creating hypnotic furor by improvising minimalist perpetual motion.

Vince Mendoza and David Balakrishnan, an original member of the quartet, furnished a powerful and insistent arrangement of Dizzy Gillespie’s “Night in Tunisia,” in which the orchestra competed with the soloists in cacophonous dialogue.

Balakrishnan also provided “Waterfall With Blenders” (from “Spider Dreams”), a New Age-style movement in which the orchestra role seemed dispensable and the quartet part flagged, despite its frequent fiery, and a few poignant, moments.