Pittsburgh Symphony Lets Loose With Glorious Sound

The Pittsburgh Symphony’s venture into Southern California--in concerts at the Music Center on Friday night and the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Saturday--told us very little about the orchestra, its home or its new music director, Mariss Jansons. We learned nothing, for instance, of Pittsburgh as a city with innovative modern art. Nor was there any indication in the programming that the orchestra spent the last two decades with music directors Andre Previn and Lorin Maazel, who are composers.

The symphony, in playing some of the most popular works of Beethoven, Mahler, Sibelius and Berlioz, seemed to have but one intention--to demonstrate how good it is. The orchestra has always had an excellent reputation, always been a thorn in the side of the so-called Big Five orchestras of the East Coast, even back when such a distinction might have made some sense.

But it also has suffered from lack of a proper limelight lately. Maazel honed a spectacular ensemble, it sometimes seemed, as a personal tool for his interpretive eccentricities. And the orchestra is hardly served by its latest recordings, such as backing up Itzhak Perlman in slushy arrangements of popular film music.

The weekend concerts indicated that, with Jansons--a Latvian who has long been an important figure on the St. Petersburg music scene--Pittsburgh remains a world-class ensemble. The playing was wonderful in the sheer visceral presence of its sound, and wonderfully responsive to a conductor who does not seem to like anything simple. He thrills in big effects, yet while brass blared deafeningly, it never lost its golden hue in the massive climaxes of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. In the drier, more immediate acoustic of Segerstrom Hall, the climaxes of Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique” were extraordinarily vivid.

Pittsburgh’s players can do much more, and Jansons wants it all. The strings are sleekly silken, but also extraordinarily nimble, and Jansons drove them well into the red zone. In the fastest sections of both the Mahler and Berlioz, he wanted not only speed but every tiny dynamic detail realized, creating exhilarating, swirling patterns. The Berlioz was the richest performance of the weekend, with instrumental colors standing out in brilliant high definition.

The orchestra has impressive individual players. Timothy K. Adams Jr. is the perfect timpanist for a steel town, every stroke a wake-up call. In the Mahler, George Vosburgh’s trumpet solos were unusually clear and sweet. The winds in the Berlioz were a rainbow of colors, and it was great having the two harps out in front of the orchestra.

Jansons clearly likes to make a splash and keep making it. At Segerstrom, he introduced riotous Berlioz with riotous Sibelius, whose First Symphony was inspired by the “Fantastique.” Though with long roots in Scandinavia--Jansons had also been music director of the Oslo Philharmonic for 20 years--he was more the Russian with the Finnish symphonist, as Sibelius seemed to blow into the hall in massive blasts of cold wind and exciting fury, but also revealing glorious vistas.

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The Pavilion concert was a marathon, with Mahler’s 70-minute epic prefaced by Beethoven’s expansive First Piano Concerto, with Helen Huang as soloist. The orchestral accompaniment was vital and alert. Huang, who has grown up on the concert stage in the last several years, is now, at 16, practically the old pro. She was assured in every phrase; her fingers knew exactly what to do. Yet I’m not sure she has yet learned to listen. The 56-year-old conductor made the young Beethoven’s boundless spirits sound rejuvenating; the young pianist played his notes.

Huang might do well to study the responsiveness that this magnificent ensemble so impressively demonstrates. But Jansons might also offer better example, by heeding music closer to the world that the orchestra, we and she all live in. Pittsburgh and its new conductor are simply too good to keep doing what so many others also do very well.