Little Emotion, Less Tempo in Kyung-Wha Chung’s Beethoven

Confusing tempo with profundity, Kyung-Wha Chung played the slowest Beethoven Violin Concerto on record with the Pacific Symphony Wednesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

Or maybe it just felt that way.

It wasn’t just the slow movement that proceeded at a glacial pace. Chung brought the first movement to a virtual halt several times, with unwarranted and ineffectual downshifts in tempo, and she never took flight in the third.

She was an intense eyes-shut player, standing solid as a tree trunk or else crouching toward the first violins or cellos as if having a private dialogue with them. When she wasn’t playing, she followed the “expression” of the music with facial or body language, but all that emotion rarely emerged in her playing.

The first movement cadenza was her most arresting moment, revealing an impressive, seamless and dense technique. Conductor Carl St.Clair accompanied with attentive consideration.

He opened the program with the world premiere of Michael Kurek’s 10-minute “That Which Remains Unspoken,” commissioned by the orchestra. In prefatory remarks from the stage, the composer, a professor at Vanderbilt University, said that he was interested in writing melody and that the title was meant to suggest words that never got said to lost loved ones.

After a lightly scored, luminous opening, the work spooled out a pleasant but hardly moving theme amid increasingly squandered full orchestra resources. Aiming for pathos, Kurek hit soap opera.

St.Clair closed the concert with the Mussorgsky-Ravel “Pictures at an Exhibition,” accompanied with audience-friendly supertitles to cue and also explain the various sections ( tuileries are gardens in Paris).

The orchestra sounded bright and rich, deep and present, with some light and eerie string tremolos counterbalancing many other industrial-strength passages.