Symphony Unleashes Mighty Sonic Forces

It’s a time, a month, a season of celebrations. In Orange County, the Pacific Symphony is noting its 20th anniversary and the 10th year of music director Carl St.Clair, who began the season over the weekend in Segerstrom Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

Friday night, the hall was filled--there seemed to be no empty seats--the ambience festive, the listening serious. Mahler’s massive, joyous Eighth Symphony occupied the program.

The hoopla was justified. Surviving this long with growing artistic credibility, both the orchestra and conductor St.Clair deserve admiration. Yet what they earned with this thrilling performance went beyond mere recognition for achievement.

With eight impassioned vocal soloists plus three tightly prepared adult choirs and the accomplished Pacific Symphony Children’s Chorus singing the Latin hymn of Part I and the Goethe scene abridged by Mahler in Part II, this was a demonstration of the work’s dramatic unity, its narrative thrust, the power of its words.

And the enlarged orchestra supported all that textual poetry with music of soaring excitement and deep contemplation appropriate to each portion of the composer’s vision. The brilliant and mellow string section led the way, as it often does, splendidly, consistently abetted by the virtuosic woodwind and brass choirs. Among several outstanding solo instrumental voices were concertmaster Raymond Kobler and violist Robert Becker.

Within the octet of strongly cast solo singers, only the light bass of Stephen Morscheck failed to cut through the orchestral curtain of sound. Otherwise, sopranos Bridgett Hooks, Sara Seglem and Brenda Dawe, mezzo-sopranos Elizabeth Bishop and Diane Curry, tenor Paul Lyon and baritone Clayton Brainerd invested their words with clarity and intensity while producing usually handsome, well-projected sounds.

Performing from one of the Segerstrom balconies, Dawe impressed with her brief solo as Mater Gloriosa; Seglem proved consistently radiant in her solos as a Penitent; Bishop and Curry made beautiful and textually pungent contributions; unfazed at the top of the staff, soprano Hooks, assigned the most challenging of all these parts, sang beautifully in every moment.

Equally accomplished, the four choirs also delivered first-rate enunciation and tone-blending. John Alexander is conductor of both the Pacific Chorale and the University Singers from Cal State Fullerton, and deserves credit for the clarity and beauty produced by them. Bruce Rogers leads the three-county membership of the Mountainside Master Chorale. Mary Ester Blakley is director of the Pacific Chorale Children’s Chorus.

All of these musicians, totaling over 500 at each of the two weekend performances (the program was repeated Saturday night), wholeheartedly gave the apparently obsessed St.Clair the attention, focus and sound-painting he required to hold the entire undertaking to his vision of Mahler’s massive, but not sprawling, canvas. If there were too many climaxes in Part I, that is really the composer’s doing; to restrain the enthusiasm caused by these musical challenges is practically unthinkable.

Then, Part II unfolded, with the conductor’s canny guidance, in an apprehensible linear sequence. Its ending, of course, proved cathartic, inexorable and emotionally shattering to the listener. That is what Mahler wrote, and that is what we were fortunate to experience.