Strauss With Visual Aids

Pacific Symphony music director Carl St.Clair is a wizard at making audiences comfortable with classical music. But this time he may have gone too far.

In the second performance of a colorful program including works from or about Spain, the orchestra Thursday night offered something I’ve never seen before: supertitles for a tone poem.

At first blush it makes sense. Richard Strauss’ sprawling “Don Quixote” is essentially a theme and 10 variations, each reflecting a passage of the Cervantes novel about the windmill-tilting knight. Helpful program notes gave the text for each variation, but because they are strung together seamlessly, it is difficult for any listener to follow along.

So the Pacific Symphony management lowered a supertitles screen normally used to translate opera lyrics and displayed the names of each variation as the music progressed--like track numbers on a CD player. A handy guide, right?

Except that it turned what was meant to be a musical experience into a kind of homework exercise, just a shade more evocative than a Berlitz language tape. Distracted by the flashing titles, audience members were encouraged to analyze the purpose of each passage--are those muted horns imitating sheep in Variation II?--and not just listen.

Let’s hope the idea doesn’t catch on. Imagine the application to other works. Will the screen flash “Bird singing” in the second movement of future performances of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” symphony?

Supertitles aside, it was a solid performance of the Strauss, distinguished by warm and lyrical solos from principal cellist Timothy Landauer and principal violist Robert Becker, whose instruments played the roles of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, respectively.

St.Clair matched this relative heavyweight on the program with a trio of lighter works, all engaging in their way. The Los Angeles Guitar Quartet served as soloists in Joaquin Rodrigo’s “Concierto Andaluz”--a justly lesser-known relative of the celebrated “Concierto de Aranjuez” for guitar and orchestra.

The orchestra also revisited a 1996 work commissioned for the 10th anniversary of the Orange County Performing Arts Center, “Hot Buttered Rhumba” by Robert Xavier Rodriguez. This is a good-natured piece of razzle-dazzle well suited to the Pacific Symphony’s first-rate brass section.

Finally, the orchestra dashed off a rousing performance of “Espana,” just about the only thing French composer Emmanuel Chabrier is remembered for. Altogether it was an entertaining concert--at least, once the homework was over.