National Symphony Polishes Up Rare Works

In the second of two programs in their three-performance visit to the Orange County Performing Arts Center, conductor Leonard Slatkin and his National Symphony on Sunday brought three unfamiliar works to the Eclectic Orange Festival: Haydn’s irresistible, seldom played Symphony No. 67, John Adams’ loud and lovable “Slonimsky’s Earbox” and Edward Elgar’s Symphony No. 3: “Elaborated from the composer’s sketches by Anthony Payne.”

That last is a mouthful and an earful, and, in the big picture, of questionable worth. The composer left behind only notes for his Third Symphony before he died in 1934; after some resistance, British musicologist and composer Payne finally received the family’s blessing to use those notes to construct a version of what might have been.

Slatkin and the greatly upgraded National Symphony--which hadn’t been heard here in a decade, during which time Slatkin came to its leadership--gave the work, finished in 1997, a brave and colorful performance.

Like Elgar’s First Symphony, the Third is long (54 minutes on Sunday afternoon), swollen, fragmentary, episodic, fitfully melodious, portentous and unrewarding. It is not a beauty, though it is pretty; mostly, it seemed endless.

But the playing was splendid. The National Symphony used to be a willing but ragged band, a second-level orchestra among American symphonic ensembles. The National Symphony heard Sunday in Costa Mesa was new and improved, a tight orchestra strong in all choirs, blessed with bright soloists and with a total sound of mellow brilliance.

Opening the program, Haydn’s gem-like Symphony No. 67 in F lives by its charms, which are abundant. With a reduced orchestra--looking to be mostly younger members of the ensemble--Slatkin let all these charms be heard. In several moments he even stopped conducting and let the players sing out.

On the other hand, Adams’ frenzied “Slonimsky’s Earbox,” an homage of sorts for Los Angeles’ musical lexicographer Nicolas Slonimsky, displayed the overt virtuosity of the orchestra’s players, in raucous combinations yet with an apprehensible balance the composer no doubt intended. Accessible and saucy, it must be as much fun to perform as it is to hear. Again, Slatkin let it happen.