Pasadena Symphony Still a Great Looker at 70

The Pasadena Symphony is like the girl next door in old movies who takes off her horned-rim glasses, unfastens the bun in her hair and shows up at the prom looking like a million bucks. You wonder why she doesn’t get out more often.

Opening its 70th season Saturday at Pasadena Civic Auditorium, and launching Jorge Mester’s 14th year as music director, the Pasadena Symphony sounded in excellent shape in a program of French music. So much so, in fact, that it borders on the ridiculous that the group will give just five formal concerts this season.

Mester is a consistently interesting musician. His manner with the orchestra is almost fussy, the way he pokes and prods at it, urges and shushes it, fastidiously shaping phrases, gauging balances, setting articulations. The results are never overdone, though, but always lively, intricate and purposeful.

So it was with Debussy’s “La Mer,” which began the concert. Forget about the sleekness and steely edge that many conductors implant on this score. Mester discovered its delicate textures, sought and achieved a warm clarity and found propulsiveness without pressing. The Pasadenans performed with a natural ease and grace.

Then, French violinist Olivier Charlier performed Saint-Saens’ Violin Concerto No. 3, for some reason. A work full of empty profundities, purple prose and formulaic virtuosity, it seemed well beneath the talents of this proficient, elegant and silken-toned musician. He appeared to genuinely like it, however, showing so in his facial and body expressions, and dispatching it pointedly. Have him back; play something else.

The 17-year-old Bizet’s Symphony in C concluded the evening in an ebullient, almost giddy account. One might object that Mester pressed this affable work a little too hard, and that its classical textures were distorted by a full string section. But the thing had so much vim and good cheer, the playing such polish, that one couldn’t. The conductor departed, blowing kisses to his orchestra. We know the feeling.