Pacific Symphony Communes With Bruckner

Carl St.Clair succeeded admirably in the hardest part of the first Bruckner symphony he has conducted here in his nine-year tenure with the Pacific Symphony, one work on a three-part program Wednesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

That task is to overcome Bruckner’s boxy, start-and-stop, sometimes insipid writing in the second movement. St.Clair made it all one sensitive piece and made it flow, drawing upon the especially lyrical playing of his violas.

From then on, things worked quite well, with the conductor on the composer’s wavelength, although sometimes St.Clair mistook sheer dynamic for Bruckner’s awe-struck, loving visions of God’s grandeur.

The problems had occurred earlier. St.Clair didn’t connect the first movement to its two spiritual Ninth Symphony godfathers: its numinous moments inspired by Beethoven’s Ninth; its arching architecture by Schubert’s. Here, there were too many disconnects between the huge-scaled arcs and arches. It was less Gothic cathedral than Industrial Age machine. Still, it was an impressive beginning.

A regular visitor and a recording soloist with the orchestra, Canadian pianist Alain Lefevre, joined St.Clair for Mozart’s Concerto No. 25, K. 503. The performance tended to be tight and cohesive, with few explorations of nuance and mood. The outer movements oddly emerged with more warmth and ease than the songful middle one. Some low tones on the Yamaha sounded very tubby.

Soloist and conductor showed their well-seasoned collaboration. When the pianist went into steeplechase tempos in the last movement, St.Clair had no trouble keeping up.

Lefevre played Chopin’s Waltz in C-sharp minor as an encore.

The program proper began with a propulsive performance of the Overture to Mozart’s “The Abduction From the Seraglio.” St.Clair prefaced that, however, with an unscheduled tender account of the Air from Bach’s Suite No. 3 (a.k.a. “Air on the G String”) dedicated to M. William Dultz, a board member who died last week.