Gorgeous, just as he demands

After four years at the helm of the New York Philharmonic, Lorin Maazel can come off as a scary conjurer. Even New Yorkers who dismally dis this music director for having so little influence on their city’s cultural life grudgingly admire his technical wizardry, his daunting survival skills and the fact that he gets a brilliant but notoriously confrontational band to play, night after night and year after year, as if every player’s life depended on every note.

On Tuesday and Wednesday nights, Maazel made his first California appearances with his Philharmonic at the recently opened Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Orange County. The programming disdained imagination. The concerts launched a tour to Japan and South Korea on which an American music director (and a composer himself) and America’s oldest orchestra will carry in their baggage no American music and no music remotely of our time.

Tuesday’s big piece was Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony; Wednesday’s was Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique.” Each symphony was preceded by a pair of flashy late 19th and early 20th century showpieces.

A steady diet of this sort of thing could, indeed, be wearying and worrisome. Yet “heroic” and “fantastic” aren’t inapt adjectives for what the orchestra accomplished in Segerstrom. When performances are as committed as they were at these concerts, imagination may be permitted to go on a short vacation.

A regular complaint in the New York press is that Maazel is, at his worst, an obnoxious micromanager. This is where the conjuring comes in. Standing coldly, imperiously at the podium, he commands with the flick of his wrist the violas or the oboes or whomever he chooses, seemingly on the spot, to come in out of nowhere and do a little interpretive dance with some minor detail. It’s an amazing feat but a distraction. Maazel does this, critics complain, simply because he can.

Well, he did little of that in Orange County, and when he did, he was almost playful -- that term, of course, being relative for so haughty a figure.

The “Eroica” was, for the most part, straightforward and unfussy. The sense of forward movement was unerring. The energy level represented the Manhattan experience. The sound was big, unashamedly full of delicious fat and, when the brass blew, downright explosive.

The heart of Maazel’s interpretation was his sculptural incisiveness. His Beethoven is a study in articulation. Staccato chords are gunshots. He emphasizes a furious exactness that made the last movement feel like a Ferrari gripping the road at high speed. He happily turns up the volume high enough that even the deaf Beethoven might have been able to hear his symphony, but there’s no loss of detail, just more and more of it.

The “Symphonie Fantastique” was fussy. But here Maazel did Berlioz’s bidding. He highlighted every nuance in the score, which is full of indications for swells or suddenly changed dynamics or tiny tempo fluctuations. Berlioz sought a psychedelic experience in sound, and nothing might seem more ironic than the strait-lacedlooking Maazel insisting with military strictness on intoxication.

And nothing could be, in the end, less druggy than this tightly controlled performance. But once more, Maazel pushed forward with ferocious, exhilarating power and dazzled with the details of Berlioz’s vivid orchestration.

No section in the tough New York Philharmonic dares appear weak, but the lower the pitch, the stronger it gets. The deep brass approach the ear as sonic monsters moving mounds of earth or millions of gallons of water as they emerge from some mysterious depths. The violins and violas shimmer and shine, but the cellos and the basses are like heavy cables -- flexible, yet secure enough to withstand hurricane-force winds.

The woodwinds won me over elsewhere. Tuesday night’s concert began with Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Haydn, surprisingly bland, and Kodaly’s “Dances of Galanta.” In the latter, Hungarian piece, the gallant solos by Stanley Drucker, clarinetist with the orchestra for more than half a century, warmed an otherwise cool performance.

On Wednesday, the opening pieces -- Dvorak’s “Carnival” Overture and Ravel’s “Rhapsodie Espagnole” -- proved irresistibly splashy if inconsequential, not lacking for a second in gaudy color but lacking, especially in the Ravel, in colorful atmosphere.

The New York Philharmonic’s appearances were a new test for the Segerstrom Concert Hall’s acoustics, which can be very good if your seat is very good, meaning not too close to the stage, not under overhangs and not, on upper floors, hanging precipitously over the stage. But the hall loves brass, and its clarity causes inner lines to stand out -- making it a perfect acoustic hat from which Maazel could happily pull his rabbits.

mark.swed@latimes.com