SAME-DAY REVIEW: USC Thornton Symphony successfully scales Richard Strauss’ mountaintop

By Robert D. Thomas
Music Critic
Southern California News Group

About 40 years ago I heard my first live performance of Richard Strauss’ tone poem An Alpine Symphony when Zubin Mehta conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. I vividly remember the performance — Strauss’ sprawling tone poems were right in Mehta’s wheelhouse (to use a baseball term) and he and the Phil were in peak form. I also have never forgotten Martin Bernheimer’s review in the Los Angeles Times: “This was magnificent playing of awful music.”

In the ensuing four decades, I have come to realize that while Bernheimer was spot on with regard to the performance, he was off the mark with regard to the piece. Sprawling? Yes. Grandiose? Yes. Awful? No (sorry, Martin, to disagree with you).

This afternoon Carl St.Clair led the USC Thornton Symphony Orchestra in a performance of An Alpine Symphony at Walt Disney Concert Hall as part of the L.A. Phil’s “Sounds About Town” concert series. It was a stupendous undertaking for a university orchestra, even one as good as this one.

For one thing, it’s quite likely that few, if any, of the musicians had even seen the score (nor perhaps even heard the piece) before they began learning it this season. Moreover, the oversized forces includes a massive percussion section (two sets of timpani, bass drum, cowbells, glockenspiel, snare drum, tam-tam, thunder machine, triangle and wind machine), along with two harps, celesta, organ and more than the usual strings winds and brass.

Although Strauss stopped and started this composition several times, what emerged in 1915 was a 50-minute musical depiction of his journey up and down an Alpine mountain, played in 22 connected movements — thankfully, the folks at Disney Hall projected the titles to help everyone in the audience figure out where they were on this sonic journey. One thing that the USC folks had that wasn’t available in the Pavilion was Disney’s kick-ass pipe organ!

If this performance wasn’t always magnificent playing, there were many, many splendid moments. St.Clair (who had a miniature score in front of him but didn’t appear to use it) led a bracing account that didn’t wallow in Strauss’ excesses but brought both spaciousness and an ever-moving forward line to the performance.

The players hadn’t, perhaps, had enough time to adjust to the ultra-live Disney Hall acoustics, which produced some overly bright overtones, and the entire orchestra could have used some more bass heft, but those sorts of things will come when the collegians move out into the professional world.

At the conclusion, St.Clair had each of his section leaders and then each section stand, a welcome and appropriate gesture for the splendid effort put forth.

St.Clair certainly isn’t the first conductor to use the “macro/micro” form of programming, so it was no surprise that he began the program with a Mozart work. What was unusual was the choice: Concerto in E-flat Major for Two Pianos, K. 365.

The soloists, Bernadene Blaha and Kevin Fitz-Gerald, are both Canadians who now teach at the USC Thornton School of Music. They both delivered pristine performances, so much so that even when you were looking at them you couldn’t tell when one had handed off the solo line to the other.

St.Clair (who in addition to being artistic leader of the Thornton ensembles is also music director of the Pacific Symphony) led a reduced ensemble of strings, two oboes, two bassoons and two horns with grace and sensitivity and the musicians — soloists and ensemble — responded with elegant playing throughout.
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(c) Copyright 2017, Robert D. Thomas. All rights reserved. Portions may be quoted with attribution.

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