Music Reviews : Conductor Mester Shows Off Pasadena Symphony

Conducting is a power game, and those who win it sometimes do so by pretending not to play. Jorge Mester, for instance, closed his fourth season as music director of the Pasadena Symphony on Saturday night at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium with a program designed to show off his orchestra as the virtuoso ensemble it is.

Mester makes conducting look easy. He may move a lot and make sweeping gestures where other baton-wielders hold back, but he never shows strain, or seems to be climbing a mountain. He simply presides, alertly and enthusiastically.

The agenda he chose for the display of his well-oiled ensemble stressed the brilliance of its separate choirs and the abilities of its soloists. In Ellen Taafe Zwilich’s violently attractive Second Symphony (1985), Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and the two orchestral suites from Ravel’s “Daphnis et Chloe,” Mester let the orchestra show its accomplishments as individuals and as a group.

There may be no more rousing way to end a concert, or a concert year--the Pasadena orchestra was closing its 60th season at this event--than with the lush and magnanimous gestures of the “Daphnis” suites. After some spotty and scrappy moments right at the beginning, this performance settled down to the serious business of brilliant statement, instrumental by-play and transparent textures. By the end, it had become a triumph.

At the start of the concert, Zwilich’s post-Straussian orchestral essay, subtitled “Cello Symphony” for reasons that become obvious during its course, grabbed the listener by the ears and held on, adamantly. Aggressive, driven, bitter but not cynical music, this work by the 1983 Pulitzer Prizer winner is more than a showpiece for a brilliant cello choir--in this case, the 12 members of the Pasadena section, led by Douglas Davis--it is a compelling addition to the repertory.

Jean-Yves Thibaudet’s technically solid, musically well-grounded playing of the Rachmaninoff Rhapsody fell into place appropriately in this context. The 26-year-old French pianist, who studied in Paris with Descaves and Ciccolini, can boast fleetness, strength and reliable reflexes. All he lacked in this perfectly competent but monochromatic performance was that sense of character that can inform and differentiate every single one of these variations--that, and the range of piano tone to support such differentiation.