Pasadena Symphony Ends Season With Splashy, Lesser-Known Fare

Looking at the Pasadena Symphony’s final program of the 1999-2000 season, you would swear that it had been put together by an avid record collector armed with a wish list of 20th century pieces that hardly anyone ever plays live. That collector must have been absolutely giddy at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium Saturday night, savoring splendidly played details in the splashy orchestrations of Respighi and Grofe, and the quasi-jazz, flapper-era musings of Milhaud that even CDs do not adequately reveal.

All three works came from a relatively narrow slice of time (1923-1931) when boundaries in music were being blown out. It’s not easy for classically trained performers to feel the idiosyncratic swing of Milhaud’s “La Creation du Monde,” and, understandably, that element was somewhat smoothed over on Saturday. But conductor Jorge Mester could still get a raucous charge out of the jazzy explosions and conjure wistful playing in the serene passages.

“Rossiniana” is the second, more subtle and lesser-known of Respighi’s raids on the late piano music of Rossini (the first being “La Boutique Fantasque”), but it is no less delightful--especially when the massive orchestra gets to kick up its Italian heels in the concluding Tarantella. Eventually, Mester himself seemed to be lovingly immersed in delicious detail, taking slowish tempos in the last two movements to linger and catch it all.

Ferde Grofe eventually made a career of painting musical travelogues of American landscapes with wildly uneven results, yet “Grand Canyon Suite” remains the only one that has caught on in a big way. Even so, about the only time you hear any of it live nowadays is when a jazz musician puckishly quotes “On the Trail” during a solo. Thus, Mester’s performance was something to savor, where the big tunes sang out in rich, thick textures, the storm was whipped up uninhibitedly, and “On the Trail” was rather broadly milked for comic effect.