Music Review : St.Clair Ventures Massive Mahler in Orange County

COSTA MESA —  Bigger isn’t necessarily better. Sometimes bigger is just bigger.

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But bigger was terrific Wednesday night at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, and poignant too, when Carl St.Clair led the Pacific Symphony Orchestra, the Pacific Chorale and two operatic soloists through the mighty, massive, mystical, spiritual, folksy, poetic, gut-thumping convolutions of Mahler’s Second Symphony, a.k.a. “Resurrection.”

Virtually every local man, woman and child who could hold an instrument or sing a scale was called into service. The orchestra enlisted 103 players, and it could have used a few more. The chorus numbered 146.

The PSO hadn’t attempted anything so grand since Keith Clark--remember Keith Clark?--rushed in to tread over Schoenberg’s “Gurrelieder” back in 1988. The founder of the orchestra, ambitious literally to a fault, had ventured the Mahler Second a year earlier.

St.Clair, who was climbing this symphonic Everest for the first time, could have settled for a superficial success. Mahler ensured an ultimate ovation for any maestro who can sustain the 90-minute endurance test, keep the unwieldy performing apparatus more or less on track and make an uplifting noise in the zonking finale.

Enlightened conductors, however, do much more. They seek out the inner voices. They give the sentiment plenty of breathing space, even in the face of linear sprawl. They paint with dynamic light and shade. They sustain tension by avoiding too much stress on isolated wonders.

It would be an exaggeration to claim that St.Clair’s initial effort placed him instantly in the pantheon of Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer and Leonard Bernstein. Some details got blurred on Wednesday. Pianissimos tended to receive a bit less attention than fortissimos. The ultimate, cumulative climaxes may not have been perfectly calculated.

But. . . .

Nothing went seriously wrong, and much went emphatically right. Refinement and refocusing will no doubt come with repetition.

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Despite his relative youth, St.Clair certainly did not offer what one would call a brash young man’s Mahler. His interpretation was marked with maturity at every mellow turn.

He established the tragic drama at the first portentous outburst, but never suggested cheap theatrics. He sustained the bucolic charm of the andante slowly and gently, without succumbing to bathos. He churned out the quirky imagery of the third movement--St. Anthony’s sermon to the fish--without permitting the grotesquerie favored by a few famous colleagues. In the “Urlicht” and concluding scherzo, he found a sensitive balance between introspection and cataclysm.

Legs spread, swaying torso bent forward, the conductor occasionally resorted to his familiar snake-dance mannerisms. Even then, however, his histrionic attitudes seemed directed at the players, not the audience. That cannot be said for the celebrated Mahlerians who regard the inherent pathos as an excuse for self-indulgent histrionics.

The Pacific Symphony responded to St.Clair’s enlightened urgings with splendid power, ample flexibility and more accuracy than one had a right to expect under the circumstances. Stephanie Sant’Ambrogio, a celebrated chamber-music specialist and first chair at the Akron Symphony, served impressively in her apparent audition as concertmaster.

The Pacific Chorale, presumably trained by John Alexander, began its momentous task with a perfectly gauged, resonant whisper in the Klopstock ode, “Auferstehn.” As the movement evolved, the choir rose with equal poise to the composer’s demands for ethereal purity and elemental force.

Mimi Lerner, rather generously heralded by the local publicity machine as a “Metropolitan Opera star,” sang the mezzo-soprano solos with pallid competence. Christina Cox sounded properly sweet as she floated the few ascending phrases allotted the soprano.

The audience managed to resist mood-shattering applause between movements, for once, but mustered an ovation at the end. For once, it was deserved.