Less Is More in ‘Elegy for Anne Frank’

Devotion and meditation tied together the four-part program by conductor Carl St.Clair, the Pacific Symphony and the Pacific Chorale on Wednesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

The first half of the concert consisted of American music written since 1965, with two of the composers present.

Lukas Foss played the prominent piano part of his “Elegy for Anne Frank” (1989). Richard Danielpour, whose three-year stint as Pacific composer-in-residence ends in August, took bows after the West Coast premiere of his “Voices of Remembrance,” written for the National Symphony of Washington, D.C.

There are two versions of Foss’ elegy (both on the Pacific’s recent disc of Foss’ music on Harmonia Mundi): one for orchestra, the other that incorporates a narrator reading excerpts from Anne Frank’s diary. Foss’ daughter, actress Eliza Foss, was the narrator at the Pacific concert.

Although ultimately Foss drew on the full resources of the orchestra, he did so only for a single dramatic arc as a Nazi march emerged from distant background noise to crush the music evoking Anne’s childhood and innocence.

Similarly, Eliza Foss knew that histrionic emphasis would only detract from Frank’s words. So she didn’t introduce any. For emotional impact, less was more.

The Danielpour piece, written in 1998 and dedicated “to the memory of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King,” is scored for full orchestra, and solo string quartet and other forces.

Some critics weren’t kind when Leonard Slatkin led the Washington premiere in January 2000. One called it an “embarrassingly lofty work.” Another described it terms of “crass literalism,” with the composer “at his most self-indulgent.”

But this is also an abstract piece, and it’s legitimate to consider it in purely musical terms. On that basis, for much of its 25 minutes, the continuous, three-movement work skillfully modifies material as it passes back and forth between the solo quartet and the orchestra.

Two themes--an upward scale passage and a more chromatic arabesque--change color and character, and so remarkably embody the notion of the piece being about the composer’s memory of events rather than a newsreel of them.

Unfortunately, the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” could not, in its fragmented form here, carry the weight the composer intended. The brief allusions to “Hail to the Chief,” however, seemed innocuous enough.

The solo string quartet consisted of Pacific principals: violinists Raymond Kobler and Paul Manaster, violist Robert Becker and cellist Timothy Landauer.

Leonard Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms” (1965) and Mozart’s unfinished Mass in C minor, K. 427 completed the program. In both cases, the chorale sounded uncharacteristically harsh.

St.Clair led an affectionate and committed reading of Bernstein’s series of psalm settings, with 12-year-old boy soprano Nicholas Boragno starting shakily but recovering.

St.Clair’s Mozart was heavy and devoid of nuance, its dynamic alternating only between loud and soft. The ill-matched vocal quartet consisted of soprano Esther Heideman, mezzo Stephanie Woodling, tenor Robert MacNeil and bass Cedric Berry.