High Notes Under Mester’s Command

Downsizing in personnel from its season-opening event four weeks ago, the Pasadena Symphony performed with chamber-orchestra-sized forces for its second concert of the season Saturday in Pasadena Civic Auditorium. The program, led by music director Jorge Mester, listed John Adams’ accessible and exciting “Shaker Loops,” the G-major Violin Concerto of Mozart and Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony.

Not to waffle: Accuracy decrees we identify the 64-year-old Mester as both a veteran conductor and one who produces music-making on a high and masterly level.

More important, one needs to call him an advocate, a maestro who protects both the composers he champions and the soloists he puts forward. In both categories, the lists are long and impressive.

Mester lived up to all these descriptions on this occasion. He shaped the progress, motion and whimsicality of Adams’ most popular minimalist showpiece. He was the cause of a handsome collaboration between soloist Philip Quint and the orchestra in the concerto. And he laid out apprehensibly the inexorable beauties in Beethoven’s beloved Eighth.

One sensed that the most rehearsal had gone into his faceted and virtuosic performance of “Shaker Loops,” however, for its execution showed the greatest contrasts of the evening. A tangible Beethovenian raucousness, overstatement and lack of restraint colored the opening movements of the Eighth.

Nevertheless, each piece made its points convincingly, and the orchestra played with its usual liveliness and solid ensemble. Outstanding in the Tempo di Menuetto of the symphony were the woodwind soloists.

Quint’s appearance combined charismatic articulation with Mozartean grace; here was a tight, stylish and affable reading with a minimum of self-consciousness and a maximum of tone color. One can hardly remember a performance of the familiar piece at once so complete and so moving.