Pacific Symphony Put Through Paces

The Pacific Symphony played its best in the hardest challenge of a three-part program Wednesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa--Bartok’s wondrous Concerto for Orchestra.

Led by music director Carl St.Clair, the symphony traced the arc from deep apprehension to overwhelming life affirmation with muscular strength and authority.

Highlights included the atmospheric beginnings of the first and third movements, the clarity of fugue passages in the finale, and a freshness and a sense of appealing naivete in the fourth movement, “Intermezzo interrotto” (Interrupted Intermezzo), before the rude interjection of the parodied march theme from the first movement of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony.

Bartok’s parody, incidentally, must be one of the great misunderstandings in music.

Shostakovich repeated and embroidered the theme almost ad nauseam not because he was so enamored of it, but because he wanted to use it to chronicle the steady, terrifying, relentless advance of the Nazi war machine across his native Russia.

The 1941 symphony, after all, bears the subtitle “Leningrad.”

It is understandable but a bit disappointing that Bartok, a deeply sensitive and patriotic Hungarian, would miss the point of the anguish expressed by a composer of the Great Oppressor to the North.

Bartok’s score, unfortunately, proved too much of a challenge to some audience members who left early. Their loss.

The Pacific does not yet sound enough like a virtuosic orchestra to do full justice to the work. There were balance problems between harps and winds, textures were insufficiently transparent, rhythmic interplay wasn’t always sharp, the chorale in the second movement was not strongly characterized.

Still, overall, the work unfolded with its distinctive power and impact.

Canadian pianist Louis Lortie was the soloist in Grieg’s Concerto in A minor, the midpoint of the program.

Once a concert repertory staple, it is now all too often neglected. Too bad. It is lovely, lively, melodic, expansive, inspiring and atmospheric.

Lortie played fast and fluently. He also played hard and cold. He found some poetic dreaminess at the start of the slow movement but rarely elsewhere, missing many possible moments of reflection and introspection. His cadenzas showed off his prowess but didn’t tell us anything personal.

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St.Clair conducted a leisurely and somewhat opaque-textured accompaniment, with the orchestra sounding sectional, blocky and rough, as in the bad old days. Perhaps the Thursday (broadcast) performance went better.

Using his hands instead of a baton, St.Clair sculpted and caressed the melodic lines of Barber’s Adagio for Strings, which opened the program.

His fluid yet surprisingly large-scaled gestures--terminating occasionally in a quick upward hitch--drew out an amorphous, almost oceanic mass of sound. But when the big climax arrived--all shimmer and silver--it didn’t seem to peak expressively, conceptually or structurally and leave us emotionally exhausted. It arrived--and passed. You could almost have missed it.