Music and Dance Reviews : Conductor Balter Guests With Long Beach Symphony

In the absence of music director JoAnn Falletta, it was left to guest conductor Alan Balter, director of the Akron and Memphis symphonies, to do what he could with an unfamiliar orchestra (the Long Beach Symphony) and a super-familiar program (Beethoven and Tchaikovsky) Saturday night in Terrace Theater at the Long Beach Convention Center. The effort seemed valiant.

But to expect miracles in such well-traveled repertory from musicians just getting to know each other is perhaps unwise. At any rate, the results of the Balter-Long Beach collaboration were of the merely solid rather than inspired variety.

They didn’t get any help from the soloist on hand, either. When one listener saw the piano being plugged in for Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto, he wanted to run for cover.

For anyone who cares about subtlety, proportion, touch and tone color, the amplification made this performance dicey from the start, and the 30-year-old soloist, Russian pianist Leonid Kuzmin, in a fast, blunt, occasionally muddled and apparently unthinking reading, took care of the rest. Balter’s accompaniment was nothing special.

Before that, the conductor had led the world premiere of Martin Herman’s engaging “The Fractal Bow,� a work employing algorithms “to express,� says the composer, “the deeply resonating beauty and dynamism in chaos in musical terms.� Yet the formidable math behind the composition results in a thoroughly interesting soundscape, a chugging, shifting, phasing-in-and-out type of music that shows the good sense of keeping its materials simple even while its processes aren’t. Balter and orchestra gave it an energetic send-off.

Energetic, too, was Balter’s reading of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, certainly not an especially magical or distinctive outing for the score, but easy of gait, reasonably detailed, polished and, ultimately, effective.