Westerners who heard the call of the East

The Pacific Symphony concert Wednesday in Segerstrom Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center peaked sooner than it should have. The program opened with two fascinating rarities, continued with an interesting if flawed curiosity and closed with a masterpiece.

The rarities were orchestrations of piano pieces by Debussy and Ravel by Australian American composer Percy Grainger. The curiosity was a Balinese gamelan-inspired work, “Tabuh-Tabuhan,” by the little-known Canadian American Colin McPhee. The masterpiece was John Adams’ “Harmonium,” a large-scale choral-orchestral piece that established the American composer’s reputation.

All were part of the orchestra’s American Composers Festival 2005, which concludes Saturday. It is the second in a three-year series exploring the influence of non-Western music on American composers. But the lens widened Wednesday to include French composers who were stunned by hearing a Javanese gamelan at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889, and Adams, whose connection to gamelan may be somewhat tenuous.

For all their Eastern inspiration, Debussy’s “Pagodes” and Ravel’s “La vallee des cloches” both retain the composers’ fingerprints: Debussy’s impressionistic textures and Ravel’s crystalline purity. This was richly demonstrated by pianist Norman Krieger, who played each piece before Carl St.Clair conducted the Grainger orchestrations.

Those orchestrations, though, were even more heavenly, adding a delicious spatial element of sounds being distributed across the stage, thus invoking the communal aspect of Indonesian music. They turned out to be the highlights of the program.

“Tabuh-Tabuhan” was McPhee’s attempt to synthesize the sounds and styles of Eastern and Western music (including jazz and Latin idioms). Certainly, the composer came to his task with great authority and integrity, having lived on the Indonesian island of Bali for nearly a decade. Later, he did much to establish UCLA as a center of Indonesian music when he taught there in the early ‘60s. (He died in 1964.)

But the work, composed in 1936, remains firmly rooted in its period. It resembles jazz symphonies of the day that satisfied aficionados of neither jazz nor classical music. It is now one thing and now another, and rarely becomes something new and whole. Essentially, it is a work that marked time. Inyoung Huh and Jan Bratoz were the prominent duo pianists.

Adams’ “Harmonium,” which closed the concert, is a complex work, daunting in its challenges. The performance sounded as if St.Clair, the orchestra and John Alexander’s Pacific Chorale were mightily intimidated by it.

Excerpt for a few climaxes that provided safety in numbers, dynamics were tentative, rhythms and attacks lacked incisiveness, words were unclear and delivered without significance (thank heaven for the supertitles), and important harmonic and tempo shifts failed to achieve their necessary effect.

Like Debussy and Ravel, and unlike McPhee, Adams, who was on hand to receive the applause, transmuted outside influences into his own style and opened a realm of possibilities.

“Harmonium” should have been the stunning close to the major orchestral program of a fascinating and important festival. Unfortunately, it was a limp anticlimax.