Long Beach Symphony Offers a Solid ‘Symphonie Fantastique’

Although in orchestra-rich Southern California hardly a season goes by without multiple opportunities to hear Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique,” the Long Beach Symphony has not contributed to the glut since 1989. Saturday at Terrace Theater, guest conductor Steven Smith renewed that orchestra’s acquaintance with the popular piece.

That it has been missed was evident in the peremptory applause at the end of both the waltz and the march. Still, it is becoming difficult to make much of an impact with this piece, one of the most astonishingly original in the repertory but grossly overworked. Smith--music director of the Santa Fe Symphony and assistant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra--was making his bid for the Long Beach music directorship with it.

And an efficient and even effective effort it was, conventional in outline but nicely filled in. Smith kept the big tunes well out front, enlivened with consistent kinetic impulse and lit with subsidiary detail.

This is also a work that makes a very thorough introduction of conductor to orchestra. The Long Beach players tracked Smith alertly, a few clunky shifts of momentum aside. The woodwinds, led by Joan Elardo’s plangently evocative English horn solos, provided a wealth of nuance, sympathetically framed by Smith.

He also accompanied the featured soloist, Italian pianist Fabio Bidini, with sensitive generosity, even while allowing the full string sections into Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2. Bidini in turn delivered bright, brittle sound in a highly personal context of extreme dynamics and expressive tempo fluctuations. The effect, however, was not at all willful, and the interaction displayed real sparkle and joy.

Smith opened with Gerald Plain’s brief “Fireworks,” a giddy fanfare of the sort American orchestral composers have had to specialize in for almost a generation--something quick and colorful, please, and do slam the door on your way out.