Pasadena Symphony Fires Up Shostakovich

Stalin wanted Shostakovich to write his Ninth Symphony along the lines of Beethoven’s Ninth, with soloists and chorus praising, of course, his glorious leadership of the Soviet people as they were finally defeating the hated Nazi invaders.

But the wily composer did nothing of the sort. His Ninth Symphony, in fact, emerged seemingly insouciantly lightweight and modestly proportioned, though it had in it what were close enough to Bronx cheers to earn Shostakovich, once again, official displeasure.

The Bronx cheers were there when Jorge Mester opened a four-part Russian program by the Pasadena Symphony on Saturday at the Civic Auditorium. The conductor led a propulsive, wonderfully energized and balanced performance of the work, though the underlying bitterness, satire and conflict could have been more accentuated.

Of the several prominent orchestral soloists in the piece, bassoonist Michael O’Donovan deserves special mention for his rendering in the fourth movement of the absolute zero of the soul and its defiant revival in the face of a brassy military juggernaut.

Seventeen-year-old Karen Gomyo made her West Coast debut as the soloist in Glazunov’s Violin Concerto. Judging a 17-year-old is a fool’s errand; by the time the review comes out, the real artist will have grown beyond what anyone says.

A student of the renowned pedagogue Dorothy DeLay at the Juilliard School in New York, Gomyo made a poised and talented soloist, playing with a warm, rounded, if modest tone. She did not command the stage, however, or make the concerto a personal vehicle.

After intermission, Mester led two works: Liadov’s “The Enchanted Lake” and Tchaikovsky’s “Francesca da Rimini.” The orchestra played Liadov’s painterly legend with shimmering, transparent and sumptuous colors.

Tchaikovsky’s cinematic warhorse comes alive in the concert hall in surprising ways. For one thing, the lush orchestration is complex and delicate; the work can be, as it was here, properly evocative and descriptive.

Certainly, Mester and the orchestra gave it sweep and conviction, and if it still didn’t rise wholly to top-drawer Tchaikovsky, neither did it embarrass anyone.