St.Clair Takes Hands-On Approach to Gorecki Symphony

Using his hands alone, as if a need for personal gesture prohibited employing a baton, Carl St.Clair conducted the Pacific Symphony on Wednesday in the Orange County premiere of Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3. With Cheryl Parrish as soprano soloist, at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, they explored its drama under stage lights dimmed for this “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.”

St.Clair had Parrish ascend a podium amid the orchestra for the first setting, a 15th century Polish poem, in which the Virgin Mary suffers along with her dying son. Although the instrumentalists sometimes overshadowed the singer, especially when she sang in her lower register, the theatrical touch proved potent and dramatically defensible. Throughout the work, Gorecki uses minimalist repetition and layers in the orchestra to establish a sense of inescapable grief from which emerges dark vocal laments.

Here, the players’ tenacious insistence and elemental power created the shadowy atmosphere. As the singer’s role became more imposing, beginning with her second text--a prayer penned on the wall of a Gestapo prison, during World War II, by an 18-year-old girl--Parrish moved to the traditional spot next to the conductor, from which she offered affecting and focused passages, pure in tone quality, and weighted with mournful content.

St.Clair had reversed the order of the printed program, beginning with the hourlong symphony and ending with the energy of Brahms’ “Academic Festival” Overture and Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. With baton in hand, he led a taut and rousing overture.

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Sheryl Staples--former concertmaster of the Pacific Symphony, who left to become associate concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra--conveyed neither excitement nor direction as protagonist in the concerto.

She did exhibit key orchestral qualities--rhythmic anchoring, reliable tone, very secure technique--but she disclosed little understanding of color, subtle dynamics or refined pacing.