Pasadena Symphony’s Grand Finale

Year in, year out, Jorge Mester proves that you can pump new life into the shopworn overture-concerto-symphony concert format if you dig a little into the repertoire. In doing so at the Pasadena Symphony season finale Saturday night in the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, he didn’t even have to reach outside the letter “B.”

Mester opened with one of those overlooked masterpieces that CD collectors know all about but are hardly ever performed live: Britten’s stark, arching, terrifying, eloquent Sinfonia da Requiem, an astonishingly profound work for a 25-year-old composer. Mester took its full measure, adopting an unusually rhythmic approach to the opening funeral march with clear-cut detail and unsuppressed dissonances, getting the middle section to snarl and gallop, building the consoling finale to a massive, thick climax. Evidently he relishes this piece, and the orchestra gave him an electric response.

Bartok’s brittle Piano Concerto No. 1 is another relatively esoteric concert hall item; not only is it a difficult piece, it also must be a thankless one for many ego-driven pianists, since their instrument rarely jumps out into the virtuoso spotlight.

Pianist Christopher O’Riley actually brought some poetic repose to the middle of the first movement while putting up a solid percussive display elsewhere, and Mester’s crew overcame a tentative opening movement with driving work in the finale.

Though the evening would have been even more interesting had Mester selected another great 20th century “B” to complete the set--and there are plenty of them--it was easy to live with a Beethoven Symphony No. 7 performed with such unimpeded, straight-ahead, life-affirming momentum, coming to a satisfying peak down the stretch in the finale.

Prior to Beethoven, eight French horn players and a trombonist serenaded retiring (after 50 years) Pasadena Symphony Orchestra horn player George Hyde with a brief, pleasing, highly imaginative composition of his, “Color Contrasts.”