JoAnn Falletta Returns to Long Beach, Still in Command

Closing the concert season in which her successor was picked, former Long Beach Symphony Music Director JoAnn Falletta is returning this month and next to lead the orchestra in its final programs of the year.

The last one will be June 16, when Falletta conducts Mahler’s Second Symphony. The first took place Saturday night in Terrace Theater at the Long Beach Performing Arts Center, when she presided over a program of works by Barber, Brahms and Bartok.

It was a happy and satisfying homecoming--the orchestra in good form, the energetic conductor master of all musical situations. Falletta and the orchestra concluded with Bartok’s exposing Concerto for Orchestra and brought it off gamely, especially the demanding night music of the Elegia and the many-faceted, virtuosic final movements. Only some flat-footed, rather than lighthearted, details in the second movement failed to make their points.

The strongest achievement in this program came in Brahms’ rigorous Double Concerto, in which the soloists were violinist Roger Wilkie--concertmaster of the orchestra since 1990--and cellist John Walz, who was principal cello here, 1981-2000.

With Falletta the exigent guiding hand, these two collaborated in a splendidly songful, technically stunning, perfectly matched performance, the kind of tonally splendrous, musically heartfelt reading the work seldom receives.

Barber’s “School for Scandal” Overture opened the proceedings authoritatively and with a polished lyricism.