Bold Playing by the L.B. Symphony

We hear, and hear about, the strengths of the orchestra calling the Music Center home, but Southern California has been boasting rich symphonic soil in other areas as well. Take, for example, the Long Beach Symphony, which opened its season Saturday with a program that was mostly conservative, but boldly delivered, in the capable hands of Music Director JoAnn Falletta.

Falletta, in charge since 1989, has shaped a robust, detailed sound with this orchestra and has been known to exercise adventurous instincts in programming. This night, though, it was largely meat and potatoes, carefully cooked and lightly salted: Beethoven’s Third Symphony and Dvorak’s Cello Concerto in B minor, with Peter Maxwell Davies’ lovable quirk “An Orkney Wedding, With Sunrise” to open (that is, after a run-through of the national anthem, in honor of the World Series, perhaps?).

Davies’ gentle-spirited depiction of a wedding celebration on the Orkney Islands is one of the more delightfully giddy, fall-apart pieces making the rounds these days. The music proceeds amid a light, tuneful haze, colored by whiskey in the programmatic back story, and looseness in the musical ranks. Enter, from stage right, bagpiper Paul Hodgins, laying down the final anthemic motif, with that highly relative intonation.

On Dvorak’s more serious note, cellist William De Rosa acquitted himself beautifully, with a singing tone and a conscientious sensitivity to the task. The Dvorak is a showcase for a cellist’s emotional goods as much as technical bravura, and De Rosa effectively plumbed some depths here, aided by the orchestra’s taut weave.

After intermission, the orchestra showed its own considerable stuff with Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, a warhorse worth hearing again and again, when it’s done right. Falletta offered assured guidance through the supreme, elegant ruefulness of the “Funeral March” and the uplifting scamper of the Scherzo, easing into duly heroic closure.

All in all, the concert was a fairly heroic season opener.