Working Up to Upbeat

Arriving at the Orange County Performing Arts Center nine years after its premiere in Brussels, Mark Morris’ complex, plotless, full-evening dance spectacle “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato” sums up in a blaze of energy the era dominated by music visualization, a way of making dances that yielded to narrative and expressive priorities in the early ‘90s.

Using the concept of doubling (dancers mirroring one another) to link dozens of sections in his work, Morris closely reflects the contrasting moods and specific text-images of a sumptuous secular oratorio by George Frideric Handel, composed in 1740 (the year before “Messiah”) to poems by John Milton and Charles Jennens.

Although the poems depicted three temperaments--happy, active, extroversion (allegro), melancholy, contemplative introversion (penseroso) and a reasoned balance between the extremes (moderato)--Morris cut nearly all the moderato sections and gave allegro the last word: a finale staged like a musical comedy curtain call, with banks of smiling dancers running toward the footlights only to suddenly swerve off into the wings.

He once explained the trumped-up happy ending by saying that he wanted to give audiences something to hum on their way to the parking lot--but more recently he told The Times that he didn’t want to close the evening with a statement promoting moderation in all things.

He may also have tried to make it easy on himself, for his allegro sequences are joyous, inventive, frequently hilarious--but the penseroso sections appear little more than formalist filler, numbingly predictable once all the gestural motifs are introduced.

Morris has been impressively penseroso on other occasions (in “Mosaic and United,” for instance), but here no sense of the life of the mind animates the rigid symmetries and clockwork limb signals imposed on music of great richness and depth.

If you flash back to Paul Taylor’s groundbreaking fusions of Baroque music and all-American athleticism, you remember a dimension beyond cleverness that Morris can’t reach here when the music slows and darkens. In brighter moments, however, there’s a reckless, intuitive brilliance that makes the evening memorable all by itself.

Wearing loose, flowing quasi-classical costumes by Christine Van Loon, the 24 members of the augmented Mark Morris Dance Group execute the work more skillfully than on a 1994 West Coast tour that bypassed the Southland. However, the interminable Philomel exercise in Act 1 still seems a desperate collage of staging strategies--dancer-proof in the grimmest sense.

Worse, the music-making in Costa Mesa is ruinous, with the Pacific Symphony under John Harbison so cautious and bloodless in attack that the splashiest contrasts in the score become strictly academic, so thin in tone that only the vitality of the dancing keeps the performance afloat. The Pacific Chorale sounds marginally more alive but generates virtually no impact because of very, very distant placement somewhere (at the back of the pit? in the dressing rooms? on the tail of Hale-Bopp?).

The crucial vocal soloists proved disastrously uneven, with tenor Frank Kelley always taxed in the extreme by florid passages and baritone Christopher Roselli simply punching out the notes with no attempt at interpretation.

Sopranos Christine Brandes and Jeanne Ommerle offered purity of tone and refinement of phrasing, but neither they nor their colleagues could project the English-language text with any clarity--again possibly because of their placement in the pit. As a result, only ticket-holders who managed to memorize the libretto in the program booklet could get full value from choreography as intimately involved with words as with music. Supertitles, anyone?

Other technical accomplishments remained first-rate on Thursday, with Adrianne Lobel literally framing the company in banks of scenic panels that continually redefined the space and added intense color shifts to the choreography. Sometimes gauzy scrims descended and the dancers became lost in mist or seemed to be moving through a sunlit haze: gorgeous effects enhanced by James F. Ingalls’ atmospheric lighting design.

* The Mark Morris Dance Group performs ‘L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato,” tonight at 8 and Sunday at 2 p.m. in the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tickets: $18-$59. (714) 740-7878.