Concerto switch is a highlight of program

The cover of the Pacific Symphony program called Wednesday’s concert at the Orange County Performing Arts Center “Kovacevich’s Emperor.” But between the printing of the cover and the specifics inside, Stephen Kovacevich decided, according to an orchestra spokesperson, that there wasn’t enough rehearsal time to do the “Emperor” -- Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto -- justice. So he and the orchestra played Beethoven’s First Concerto instead.

The discrepancy was not explained to the audience, who got to hear a stylish and energetic Beethoven performance nonetheless. Kovacevich has some of the calmest, quietest hands in the business, but that doesn’t prevent him from being a passionate dynamo, exploring a variety of touch, or getting a big sound out of a piano. He and conductor Carl St.Clair made the slow, middle movement a gentle and flowing portrait of growth and flowering.

The slow movement in the other offering on the program, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, was also the highlight of that work. The performance hadn’t started well. St.Clair led a stop-and-go reading that left the disparate materials in the first two movements unconnected.

About the time one was ready to abandon hope, he opened the third movement, the slow movement, with such sensitive, gentle and balanced phrasing that a different, magical world opened, one of entrancing melody and counterpoint.

At the climax, one of Mahler’s incomparable mystical visions, however, just about everything that could go wrong did. The brass turned ragged and unstable. The strings played their gorgeous arpeggios without much power. The timpani, on the other hand, launched painful assaults on the ear.

The performance never recovered its previous unearthly calm. Soprano Esther Heideman was the pitch-challenged soloist in the last movement.