REVIEW: Duplicating his first program, he all but admits it’s his final season.
It’s been a long time.
Thursday night, in Segerstrom Concert Hall, conductor Carl St.Clair stepped up to the podium to lead his 35th season-opening concert with the Pacific Symphony, a group with which, if you do the math, he has served as music director since 1990. October 1990 to be exact.
The hair is silver now, but the spirit is still willing.
Word is that this season will be his last. St.Clair, 72, said as much in a speech at an awards ceremony earlier this week. A local newspaper re-affirmed the issue a couple of days ago. But symphony officials are wary of confirming it. The orchestra has issued no press release stating so.
In spoken remarks from the stage Thursday night, St.Clair made no mention of it. Apparently, sources say, he doesn’t want to make a big deal out of stepping down. We understand.
We were there at his first concert with the orchestra in 1990. Not the season opener, but in January, when he tried out for the job, and won it. As a young stringer with the Los Angeles Times, no gray hair then, we reviewed the concert. You can look it up.
It’s been a long time.
The orchestra, of course, has already begun auditioning for a replacement. That’s been public and plainly admitted. Plans are that St.Clair will remain with the group in some form of an emeritus status. He’ll be around, he just won’t be running the orchestra.
Despite the official silence, Thursday’s concert had a nostalgic cast. The board chairman announced a new fund, bolstering St.Clair’s and the orchestra’s educational initiatives. The program duplicated the repertoire of the October 1990 debut (with one exception). The conductor reminisced about the occasion and the events leading up to it.
Music Director Carl St.Clair leads Pacific Symphony in the opening concert of the orchestra’s 46th season.
Photos courtesy of Pacific Symphony / Doug Gifford
That concert and this one ended with Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. In 1990, Leonard Bernstein, St.Clair’s teacher and mentor, had conducted the work on what would be his last concert, at Tanglewood, August 1990. St.Clair was at that performance, in the sound booth, holding the hand of Bernstein’s mother. Bernstein died a few weeks later, before St.Clair’s debut.
Thursday’s event (scheduled for repeat today and Saturday) began with a brief branding video (“Let the Music Play” it urged us, to the “Ode to Joy” theme), a short speech by the board chairman, a standing ovation for St.Clair when he was introduced, a short speech by St.Clair, and the playing and singing of the National Anthem.
Frank Ticheli’s “Shooting Stars” launched the program proper (the only difference from 1990’s program, when a new piece by William Kraft did the honors). Composed for this orchestra in 2003, it remains a bustling, dazzling, jagged proclamation, a punch in the ears of peppery dissonances, jangling bells, brave brass and vigorous cross-cutting rhythms and textures. Conductor and orchestra laid into it with their usual enthusiasm.
Ravel’s rowdy and plaintive “Alborada del gracioso” followed. The piece is one of Ravel’s miraculous orchestrations of a piece conceived for piano. St.Clair captured the lightness of its guitar strumming details and the muscular richness of the climaxes, but some of the more intricate coloristic touches were only partly accounted for.
American pianist Claire Huangci, winner of the 2018 Geza Anda Competition, came on for Rachmaninoff’s ever-present “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.” Huangci has the chops and sensitivity to play this work, but she is no gorilla. She astonished in the quicksilver variations, fleet, precise and jazzily inflected. She revealed a ready finesse everywhere, with an ear for subtle shapes and sub-phrases. Hers was essentially a chamber music conception of the piece, unselfish and unaggrandizing.
Meanwhile, St.Clair and the musicians accompanied her whole hog, with full-throated abandon, lush colorations and heavy declarations. Many of Huangci’s delicacies were lost in the din.
Her well-chosen encore was Earl Wild’s Etude No. 3 on Gershwin’s “The Man I Love.”
After intermission, Beethoven’s Seventh. It’s sometimes difficult to make much of an impression performing such a super-familiar work, at least on veteran ears. The performers crank it up and it goes again, and your ears say, “Ah yes, here’s my old friend, just as I remembered.” Autopilot can set in on both sides.
This was a rough and ready interpretation. Rough in that it lacked somewhat in precision and balance (those snazzy violin trills in the third movement could barely be detected, the 16th notes in the finale were blurred, transitions took a bar or two to settle, balances over-favored the trumpets and drums).
Ready in that no one was on autopilot, no one phoned it in. The performance had that commitment and push that would seem to be St.Clair hallmarks, the feeling that he was going to put the thing over or die trying. There was some untidiness here, but never a dull moment.
It’s been a long time. But he’s still got it.
Rachmaninoff & Beethoven
ARTISTS
Carl St.Clair, conductor
Claire Huangci, piano
Pacific Symphony
PROGRAM
Frank Ticheli: Shooting Stars
Ravel: Alborada del gracioso
Rachmaninoff: Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
Beethoven: Symphony No. 7
When: 8 p.m. Sept. 26-28
Where: Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa
Cost: Remaining seats available between $57-$248
Contact: pacificsymphony.org
Classical music coverage at Culture OC is supported in part by a grant from the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism. Culture OC makes all editorial decisions.
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