Pacific Symphony Finale Includes Snazzy ‘Route 66’

Symphonic music in this country, we are told over and over, is in trouble unless orchestras can figure out how to attract new young audiences--which, alas, have been raised almost entirely upon American pop culture. Enter Michael Daugherty, the composer who flaunts his baby boomer, pop culture credentials in his music.

Sometimes, Daugherty comes up with inspired goofiness, like his hilariously morbid skewering of an all-American revenue machine, “Dead Elvis.” Sometimes, it falls flat, as in the tediously sophomoric opera “Jackie O.” And Daugherty’s icon fetish has also produced such snazzy curtain-raisers as the piece that opened the Pacific Symphony’s otherwise risk-free season finale at the Orange County Performing Arts Center Wednesday night, “Route 66.”

One could actually make a case that “Route 66”--a West Coast premiere--and its Old World companions on the program, Brahms’ Violin Concerto and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4, have a strong linking thread; that is, they all draw from vernacular strains of their times. After all, Brahms uses Hungarian gypsy influences in his finale and Tchaikovsky makes extensive use of a Russian folk song in his finale. So in this context, Daugherty’s loud, busy, 6 1/2-minute piece--with its recurring, funky, mambo-tinged riff for brasses and a shebang closing chord that suggests Las Vegas--is just a flashy update of an old tradition. Carl St.Clair and company gave “Route 66” a properly noisy ride, although its rhythms could have used more pep.

Given the interesting and appealing new repertory that violinist Joshua Bell has been championing on CDs lately--John Corigliano’s score for “The Red Violin” and Nicholas Maw’s Violin Concerto, for example--it seemed a bit wasteful to hear yet another rendition of the omnipresent Brahms concerto. He tried out some incisive, out-of-the-routine phrasings, and to his credit, he continues to revive a neglected tradition by supplying his own first movement cadenza, one that made a nice lingering transition on the way out. Yet as a whole, the performance sounded disjointed, a patchwork of ideas crying out for a unified line and more consistently involved orchestral support.

Ultimately, St.Clair seemed most at home in Tchaikovsky, where he could toy with the elastic lines of the first movement, stretch out the final bars of the slow movement almost to the breaking point, stay out of the way of the strings’ velvety pizzicati in the Scherzo and rev up the finale’s closing bars to a ripping frenzy. Needless to say, the crowd ate it up.