Midori opens Pacific Symphony's 25th Anniversary season

By Truman C. Wang
October 10, 2003

CARL ST. CLAIR conducting

MIDORI, violinist
Pacific Symphony

Thursday, October 9, 2003  at Segerstrom Hall,
Orange County Performing Arts Center, Costa Mesa

COSTA MESA, CA – The Pacific Symphony is rare among today’s symphony orchestras, major or minor, that can boast ending the last fiscal year in the black.  That it has consistently done so over the past 25 years is real cause for celebration, reflecting the cultural vitality and health of Orange County as a whole. 

Conductor Carl St. Clair, in a prefatory speech before turning to conduct, declared that “every piece on the program has a reason for being there”.  Certainly, the loud, brash, brassy, hyper-kinetic new commission by Frank Ticheli, “Shooting Starts”, that opened the inaugural concert of the season bore little musical resemblance to the rest of the program, which was predominately dreamy and romantic.  But function-wise, it did a splendid job of kicking the new season into a spirited high gear.

The star attraction of the evening, however, was violinist Midori in her Orange County debut, playing the Mendelssohn.  Now, I am all for cultural diversity in the arts (being a second-generation Chinese-American myself), but over the years, I have observed, time and time again, the interesting phenomenon of a minority soloist drawing a large contingent of minority audience members who would normally not be regular concert goers.  The conspicuous Asian presence last night made me wonder whether it was celebrity or music that was the motivating factor.

For the serious music lover, Midori offered playing of immense skills and understated elegance – from the deceptively simple opening melody, which she immediately plunged into bravura passageworks of the finest kind, and the radiant glow of the sweet Andante folk tune, to the bustle and thunder of the Allegretto finale (like a welcome spring shower storm) – the playing was always silver-toned, self-assured, and intensely personal.  The reduced orchestra provided capable accompaniment of chamber-music clarity and refinement.

If I am somewhat ambivalent about Mahler’s First Symphony, it is because of the superlative Mahler Fourth I had heard in San Francisco two weeks ago, their silken strings and dulcet horns still ringing in my ears last night.  The Pacific Symphony, a fine ensemble that it is, proved no match for the San Franciscans’ technical brilliance.  What they had going for them, however, was the high drama and joie de vivre of their playing.  The menacing grizzly bear, the majestic sunrise highlighted the first movement.  The peasant dance in the second movement alternated excited string glissandos with the delectable rubato of the central trio.  The fearsome storm of the fourth movement (which always reminds me of the storm in Act IV of “Rigoletto”) unleashed a series of climactic episodes that could sound tedious under a lesser hand, but conductor Carl St. Clair held a tight reign on things, tying together the loosely-woven movement and capping it with a gloriously triumphant coda (the worrisome first trumpeter notwithstanding!)

Playing like this bodes well for the Pacific Symphony’s 25th Season and, indeed, for the future of Orange County’s cultural jewel. 

The Oct 9th concert was broadcast live on K-Mozart 105.1FM.  For tickets to other concerts of the 2003-2004 season, call (714) 755-5799 or visit www.pacificsymphony.org

 

Truman C. Wang is editor of Classical Voice.

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