MUSIC REVIEW : Slatkin, St. Louis Symphony Bid Farewell to L.A.

Leonard Slatkin has led the St. Louis Symphony in Cerritos and in Pasadena, but Wednesday was the first time the orchestra played in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

The problem for us Angelenos is that the Los Angeles native, who took over the St. Louis orchestra in 1979 and brought it to major-league standards, is stepping down in May to move on to the National Symphony in Washington, D.C. This concert, he said at the end of the program, marked the last time he and the orchestra would perform Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2.

It was a taut, unsentimental performance of the work, showcasing the unanimity and precision of the strings. Others have found more romantic expressivity and luxuriant tone in the music. Slatkin opted for crisp clarity, public rather than private musings and little dawdling along the way. And in the end, it sounded more efficient than affectionate.

The austere tone of the evening had been set with Haydn’s Symphony No. 70, one of the composer’s most formal and learned works, which opened the program.

True, Haydn tosses out a gesture of light wit at the end by having the concertmaster (David Halen) turn toward the audience to play an insinuating rhythmic figure without accompanying adornment. But the gesture hardly effaces the impression of rigorous counterpoint that dominates the movement and, in fact, the entire work.

The centerpiece of the concert was Claude Baker’s “Whispers and Echoes,” in its West Coast premiere. Composed for Slatkin and the orchestra in 1995, the moody 20-minute work falls into three movements, each inspired by pithy poems by Japanese master poets and each incorporating Western musical allusions and quotations.

Each finely crafted movement, in turn, evoked suggestive moods and imagery, ranging from dramatic seriousness, poignancy and dignity to nostalgic stasis and pain, particularly in the motto use of a quotation from “Fruhling,” one of Strauss’ Vier Letzte Lieder. Baker took bows from the stage.

Slatkin led a brisk performance of the Fanandole from Bizet’s “L’Arlesienne” Suite No. 2 as the encore.