Exuberant Orchestra Samples Pleasures of Spanish Music

The highly accomplished National Orchestra of Spain, led by a familiar guest conductor, Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos, came through Southern California last week.

Its penultimate appearance of five performances was Saturday night in sold-out Segerstrom Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa. There, a festive audience cheered and hollered its approval.

Indeed, there is much to admire in this resourceful ensemble, which possesses a large dynamic palette, strong first-desk soloists, effortless balances and abundant energy. Not all its playing is consistently polished, but it makes up in enthusiasm what it may lack in subtlety.

Fruhbeck’s all-Spanish program at first seemed too much of a good thing--like drinking eight glasses of orange juice at one time--but variety emerged as the evening progressed.

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Beginning with the conductor’s own orchestral transcription of Albeniz’s “Suite Espan~ola” gave a pops flavor to a program actually serious in content--these five pieces, though beloved, are over-familiar from decades of overuse as dance accompaniments and piano or guitar solos--yet the piece was so handsomely performed, it would have been churlish to complain.

Veteran guitarist Pepe Romero dominated the program, appearing as soloist in its two large center portions, Rodrigo’s familiar “Concierto de Aranjuez” and Lorenzo Palomo’s most engaging, four-part “Nocturnos de Andalucia.” The latter is a variegated garden of musical delights, comprehensive and melodious--in the way of nocturnes by Chopin and Debussy--and full of emotional contrasts.

In both works, Romero’s charismatic musicality and technical supremacy held the listener tightly through every bar of this most colorful music.

Fruhbeck and the orchestra provided affectionate, articulate yet discreet support to the soloist. And, for all the high spirits reflected on the Segerstrom stage, no one seemed to be working very hard. That is as it should be.

Even so, the most rousing part of the evening came at the end, when Fruhbeck led the two suites from Falla’s ballet “The Three-Cornered Hat” with such an irresistible combination of brio and insouciance, of energy and control, that the full house came to its feet at the end.

After that, conductor and orchestra offered an encore--the same one Fruhbeck used at a Vienna Symphony performance at Ambassador Auditorium seven years ago--the wonderfully noisy and familiar Intermezzo from Gimenez’s “La Boda de Luis Alonso.”