OVERNIGHT REVIEW: Pasadena Symphony's opening night

By Robert D. Thomas
Music Critic
Pasadena Star-News/San Gabriel Valley Tribune/Whittier Daily News
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Jorge Mester’s 25-year tenure as music director of the Pasadena Symphony is unique among American orchestras in the 21st century. Not since Seji Ozawa stepped down from the Boston Symphony podium in 2002 after 29 years of leading that prestigious ensemble has a significant American orchestra been led by one person for a quarter century or more. By comparison, Esa-Pekka Salonen left the Los Angeles Philharmonic after 17 years; Carl St. Clair is currently in his 20th year of leading the Pacific Symphony in Orange County.

Moreover, throughout Mester’s tenure the orchestra itself has been unique. The musicians make their living playing in Hollywood studio orchestras and teaching; they come together as the PSO several times a year and their longevity with the ensemble is a testimony of their regard for the now-74-year-old conductor.

In many ways, Saturday night’s concert in the Pasadena Civic Auditorium — the opening event in the orchestra’s 81st season — was quintessentially Mester. He chose two works, both pictorial pieces, each ending mysteriously rather than with bombast, a program of serious music not aimed solely at plumping up the box office. The crowd was somewhat sparse, although it was heartening to see a healthy number of students and children taking advantage of the orchestra’s new youth-oriented marketing ventures.

The evening proved to be modest in length but meaty in execution, with an emphasis on sumptuous sonorities and imagery. Even with 15 minutes of speeches and proclamations feting Mester’s tenure before the concert began, the evening ended before 10 p.m.

Debussy’s Nocturnes, a 23-minute, three movement early impressionist work, opened the proceedings. Originally written in the early 1890s, Debussy didn’t settle on the work’s finished form until 1899. It remains a rarely programmed piece, although from Saturday night’s performance, one wonders why.

Mester and Co. emphasized lushness in the opening movement, aided by sparkling solo work from Joel Timm on English Horn and Louise DiTullio on flute. Offstage horns added a nice touch to the pulsating middle movement and the finale featured more than twice the number of female vocalists that program annotators Joseph and Elizabeth Kahn cited, split into two choirs and seated within the orchestra for their wordless incantations. The antiphonal effect added just the right touch of mystery to Debussy’s meanderings.

Following intermission, Mester and his band offered a broad reading of Gustav Holst’s seven-movement tone poem, The Planets. Despite its name, Holst was writing from an astrological rather than astronomical point of view and, as the Kahns noted, the movements are arranged from a musical point of view with no consideration of the planets’ distance from the sun. It’s a piece more often heard outdoors and it was a pleasure to hear it played indoors by a first-rate conductor and ensemble.

Mester adopted brisk tempos throughout most of the piece, expanding only for the majestic Jupiter main theme in the fourth movement. The Civic’s rarely used Moeller pipe organ added rumbling reverberance occasionally and the women from the Pasadena Chorale moved offstage for their wordless warblings in the final movement.

Apart from a somewhat shaky beginning in the Holst, the orchestra’s playing was first-rate throughout the evening. The extremely attentive audience resisted the temptation to applaud at the end of the first and fourth movements, but rose for a standing ovation at the concert’s conclusion. The orchestra musicians serenaded Mester with a tusch, a brass and percussion fanfare reserved for special occasions, which this one certainly was.
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(c) Copyright 2009, Robert D. Thomas. All rights reserved. Portions may be quoted with attribution.