MUSIC REVIEW : Pacific’s St.Clair, Soloist Tocco Make Beethoven Tense

COSTA MESA â€”  Robert Schumann drew a distinction between Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto and those that flank it by calling it a slender Greek maiden standing between two Norse giants. Pianist James Tocco and Pacific Symphony conductor Carl St.Clair had other things in mind when they played the piece Wednesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, on a program that also included works by Prokofiev and Michael Torke.

The soloist and conductor infused the concerto with uncharacteristically tense drive and force, Tocco sometimes even getting ahead of the orchestra. In one passage in the last movement, for instance, the winds had to drop a few notes just to finish together with him.

Tocco’s steely fingered clarity and directness of utterance had their appeal, and he did evoke a sense of poetic isolation in the slow movement. But generally he was reluctant to linger over phrases or probe deeply. How strange, as a result, to hear the work tending to sound as if it were a virtuoso showpiece. One missed introspective repose, and the sense that the piece inhabits a different dimension than either the C-minor or the “Emperor� concertos.

St.Clair provided sympathetic accompaniment. But in lining the back wall of the stage with no fewer than eight string basses, he showed that he was more interested in big effects than in period-style niceties, contributing to the huge, dark, sometimes supercharged approach.

Under the circumstances, prefacing the concerto with Torke’s “Bright Blue Music� seemed not so serious a lapse in judgment. This attractive if simplistic 10-minute minimalist work, scored for large orchestra, opens with arresting, recurring fanfares interrupted by sliding, looping strings and passages of airy textures. The combination suggests Sibelius venturing to Hollywood to score an Alpine travelogue.

After intermission, St.Clair conducted the two Suites from Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet,� a familiar workout for the orchestra but one that elicited its most vigorous and effective playing of the evening. Although the conductor tended to start building from an already high dynamic level, this massed, dramatic music may be what the Pacific does best. It certainly tends to conceal the strings’ tendency to slip and slide around, instead of playing dead-on in unified passages.