Diemecke’s First-Season Concert Showcases His Flair, Richness

The Long Beach Symphony carried out an exciting search for a new music director last season. Five strong candidates played concerts, allowing the administration to bring the musicians, public and critics into the process.

Enrique Arturo Diemecke, a personable conductor from Mexico, was very well liked all around. He has flair. He is ambitious. He is perfectly placed to finally start satisfying the overwhelming need in Southern California musical life to have substantially more influence from Mexico. He could be just the maestro to give the orchestra a stronger community presence and national one at the same time.

Saturday night at the Terrace Theater, Diemecke opened his first season, and the flair and charm were certainly there. But it is going to be a while before he can make much of a difference for the orchestra. The administration had one significant flaw in its otherwise admirable search. It programmed, by committee no less, the first season for its new music director before making the appointment. The season brochure reads as if marketers had found a pot-boiler computer program, set its cliche factor on high and double-clicked their mouse. Clearly pleased, they called it “Hot Hot Hot.”

Speaking to the audience during a pre-concert event Saturday, Diemecke said he was given the option of changing anything on the programs he wanted, but he felt it would be unfair to do so, since many subscribers had already purchased tickets. Still, something had to be done, and he has, in the end, substantially revised the final two concerts of the season to at least include Revueltas and Mahler.

But, even with orchestras everywhere revising their concerts this month to reflect the sudden seriousness of our times, he left Saturday’s trivial program in tact. Its two main pieces were the “Scottish” Fantasy by Max Bruch, a long-faded 19th century postcard in the guise of a violin concerto, and Saint-Sans’ overstated Symphony No. 3 (“Organ”). The soloist in the Bruch was young violinist Benny Kim. The organist, Sean Coburn O’Neal, is a student at Cal State Long Beach. The overture for the evening was the Prelude to Wagner’s opera “The Mastersingers.”

There was little hope for the first half. The management, apparently against even the better judgment of a conductor who seems game for just about anything, tried an experiment for the Wagner. Diemecke, who conducts without a baton, has a showy podium presence. To better reveal what was jokingly called the conductor’s better side to the audience, an overhead video screen showed him from the players’ perspective.

Where to look? Eyes up and everything was backward, Diemecke cueing violins on one side, fiddlers sitting under him on the other. The field of vision was such that it was next to impossible not to look up and down at the same time. In the end, Long Beach offered an interesting exercise in musical deconstruction, the experience of Wagner in a fragmented, mediacentric world, with no way to focus concentration. Could the orchestra be more progressive than it seems, perhaps intending to compensate for the city’s art museum, which no longer sponsors important video art as it once did? Probably not, given the dutiful account of the “Scottish” Fantasy. Its highlight proved a glitch in the last movement, in which Kim stopped the conductor and had him turn back a page in the score.

But the Saint-Sans was, here and there, a stirring surprise. The concert had opened, as most concerts now do, with a performance of the Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings in memory of those who died in the Sept. 11 attacks on America. It was a deeply emotional reading, and Diemecke drew from some of that same store of emotion to elevate the Saint-Sans symphony about as high as it could go.

It was not a tidy performance; it was, however, a rich one. Diemecke has a flashy technique that doesn’t look all that easy to follow. But, conducting from memory, he encouraged genuinely expressive playing, especially from the strings. He found in the slow movement, with its churchly organ underpinnings, a deeply moving meditative seriousness. He made the always rousing ending of the symphony seem altogether life affirming. O’Neal was stuck with an electronic organ, but he is an excellent player, caught up, as all the orchestra seemed to be, in the enthusiasm of the new music director.

After a long-standing ovation, during which Diemecke happily handed and threw long-stem roses to his players, the conductor led the audience in singing “America the Beautiful” with a kind of fervor that, I think, made everyone feel better. Just think how much better we might also feel if he now would now roll up his sleeves and fix the season to better reflect the kind of musician he is.