Guest’s Ideas Enliven Pacific Symphony Bill

Roberto Minczuk’s tight control over the Pacific Symphony on Wednesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center could have been a prescription for tedium for the audience and frustration for the musicians--except for two things.

The 34-year-old Brazilian conductor had so many ideas that the music unfolded in consistently vivid and interesting ways.

And the orchestra is now at an artistic level where it could give him virtually everything he wanted in degrees of nuance and transparency as well as in sheer massed power.

Minczuk made a strong case for the warhorses that opened and closed this Russian program: the Polovstian Dances from Borodin’s “Prince Igor” and Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade.” Both are real pieces of music, full of interest and insights, despite their obvious, irresistible appeal and history of schlock performances.

The conductor treated the works seriously, calibrating the effects, balancing the sections and enjoying the masterly orchestrations.

While he might have let the music occasionally be more relaxed and let the section soloists work more freely, he didn’t run roughshod over them.

Concertmaster Raymond Kobler played his solos with sinuous grace and warmth, along with fine playing by a long list of other Pacific principals.

The centerpiece of the program--Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto--needs no defense as serious music. Only the brave and supremely prepared dare tackle this piece. Lilya Zilberstein made it look like child’s play.

She sped through the steeplechase runs tirelessly and without missing a note. She defied the eye but not the ear in the passages of alternating and superimposed hands, defying the notion that two objects can’t occupy the same place at the same time. Her evenness of touch was extraordinary.

Minczuk didn’t abandon his ideas and responsibilities, eliciting ravishing pianissimos and luxuriating in the composer’s quirky rhythms.

It was a great way for the orchestra to kick in the new year.