Pacific Symphony Ends Season With Mahler

Closing the winter season--this year in the middle of a heat wave--calls for festive programming. To end 1996-97, both the Pacific Symphony in Costa Mesa and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, 40 miles north, have chosen Mahler symphonies for their valedictory programs.

Carl St.Clair, the Pacific Symphony’s music director, led a gripping account of the Third Symphony in Segerstrom Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center Wednesday night. His extended orchestra was augmented by contralto soloist Ellen Rabiner, a contingent of women from the Pacific Chorale and three dozen singers of the Pacific Chorale Children’s Chorus. All proved to be in top form.

Both reliable and inspired on this occasion, the members of the instrumental ensemble produced for St.Clair the pointed intensity and Mahlerian concentration this sometimes sprawling work demands.

St.Clair not only gave each of the six movements its tightest spin, but he also created an overall scenario in which every part set up or fulfilled every other part. This is a long work, but in his hands, it found its spiritual centers and climactic peaks in the first, third and sixth movements. All those lyric interruptions and bucolic interludes never impeded the flow of the conductor’s thought.

The Pacific Symphony’s string players, apparently operating on an ever-rising spiral of achievement, ascended another plateau in their growth, aided in no small way by the presence of guest concertmaster Kevin Connolly, who excelled in his solo moments. Woodwinds and brass and a passel of virtuosic solo players from each section contributed strongly to the high standards thus articulated at the season’s valedictory.

The choral singing emerged assured, mellow and thoroughly blended, as did the participation of the children’s chorus. Contralto Rabiner made rich, purposefully projected and clear sounds fraught with those Nietzschean meanings the listener associates with this music.