Unconventional Programming Boosts Pasadena Pops Concert

The Independence Day pops concert has become a secular rite observed everywhere with a well-defined liturgy. The Pasadena Pops Orchestra and new music director Rachel Worby, however, proved intriguingly unorthodox in their observances Saturday evening at Descanso Gardens.

Midway through each half of the program, Worby scheduled a substantial and unhackneyed work by a contemporary American composer. Aaron Jay Kernis’ intensely rapt “Musica Celestis” and Joan Tower’s energetically riffing “Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman” challenged the orchestra’s often shaky agreement on pitch and rhythm and the amplification’s ability to deliver warm and integrated sound, but also put the proceedings a refreshing level above routine.

Worby, music director of the Wheeling Symphony but with strong local connections, also made a chorus, the Pasadena Classical Singers, her soloist. She even went so far as to allow the unaccompanied singers to close the first half, with Randall Thompson’s classic “Alleluia.”

With the orchestra, the choir sang an arrangement of the spiritual “Deep River,” four of Copland’s “Old American Songs”--badly scattered in “The Dodger,” beautifully tender in “Long Time Ago”--and three patriotic hymns. Worby or the sound technician invariably favored soprano-dominated balances, but the texts came through cleanly.

On its own, the orchestra had an Ellington medley, Frank Proto’s “Fantasy on the Saints,” a pair of Leroy Anderson hits, and Copland’s “Outdoor Overture.” The jazz numbers fared best, with some handsome solo contributions, excepting the oddly precarious and uninflected Anderson ditties.

Worby kept it all moving nicely and supplied comfortable, largely content-free banter between pieces. For the encore she found--what else?--Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.”