Voigt Helps Symphony Make Dramatic Impact

The Pacific Symphony is proud. This is its 10th season under a young and eager music director, Carl St.Clair, and it has a lot to show for it. The orchestra has a brash and virtuosic sound. It can now attract big-name soloists and a big recording label, Sony Classical. It has an admirable ability to serve new music and its not-always-new-music-minded subscribers. It takes its role in the community seriously, including finding support to broadcast its Saturday concerts live on KKGO-FM. It is active in music education.

So, Friday night it walked tall into a new year, century, millennium, what have you. The program opened with the premiere of a new work commissioned for the occasion from its composer-in-residence, Richard Danielpour. It featured the appearance of one of the most impressive singers around, Deborah Voigt (another bit of pride: she grew up in Anaheim). It ended with the fireworks of Respighi’s “Pines of Rome” played with enough vivid energy to displace even Disney’s “Fantasia/2000” vision of whales.

Danielpour’s piece “The Night Rainbow” is millennial music, although not on an epic scale. He is a busy composer with an appetite for grandly colorful orchestral statements; Thursday, the National Symphony gives the premiere of a bigger piece, for large orchestra, military band and string quartet (the Guarneri), in Washington. Thus for the Orange County Performing Arts Center, Danielpour had in mind something more occasional, something celebratory but still sober. Its title comes from a children’s book and served, the composer wrote in his program note, for consolation in the face of death.

The score, which lasts around 18 minutes, has a stately optimism to it; its ideas are direct. “The Night Rainbow” announces itself with dramatic chords, driving minimalist rhythms and a sweeping tune that run their course (a pleasant death). The second half is a lush, still, attractive adagio (an equally pleasant transformation). St.Clair, who has peppered his season with Danielpour, was clearly--what other word?--proud of the premiere. The performance was persuasive and contagious, but so too was a cough that half the audience seemed to catch, pretty much ruining the effect of transformation over sickness and death.

More death followed with Richard Strauss’ “Four Last Songs” and more transformation over it. Voigt’s is a glorious Straussian voice, a soprano that soars. And so it did here, lavishly accompanied by St.Clair. The singing was extremely rich. There was evident emotion in it. Yet the size felt wrong. Strauss’ touching, theatrical farewell to life (his last music) became, in the very grandness of this account, about nothing much at all.

Voigt is actually a much better singer about life, and in the two Verdi arias after intermission--”Pace, Pace, Mio Dio” from “The Force of Destiny” and “Vieni! T’Affreta!” from “Macbeth”--she revealed a dramatic intensity that proved overwhelming in all the right ways. These two great performances indicated she now has in her the potential--very close to being realized--to be a Verdian of legend.

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To follow the rush of vocal excitement caused by Voigt’s Verdi with the slightly empty but still orchestrally thrilling Respighi tone poem seemed a good idea. But we will never know, because pride ultimately became the concert’s deadly sin. A grandstanding board chairman took the podium, entertaining the audience with jokes, a flattering review of the proceedings, letters of congratulations from high places to St.Clair; next, a grandstanding, grammatically challenged politician appeared with her proclamation full of whereases; finally, a hand-on-heart speech from the seemingly unabashed music director himself.

The musical steam was released from the evening, and Respighi now seemed, at least to this listener, more empty pomp than circumstance. But maybe I’m wrong. The speeches were not greeted with groans but with appreciative laughter and applause--and not a single cough. So much for music’s reputed healing powers.