MUSIC REVIEW : Mata Conducts 2 Orchestras Outdoors

Until last week, when he appeared on the podium of the visiting New World Symphony in Costa Mesa, Eduardo Mata had been absent from these environs for more than two decades. One can only guess why--at his second local concert within five days, Saturday night at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre, the conductor from Mexico again confirmed his many strengths as a musical thinker and technician.

In this outdoor situation, at least one crucial element was against Mata. A primitive sound system broadcast the playing of the combined Pacific and New World symphonies--the latter appearing as a guest on the five-event Irvine Meadows series by the Pacific organization--in a coarse and unrealistic way. That sound never became grossly distorted, yet it still distracted.

With this adversity, Mata nevertheless made music. And, with whatever coaxing was necessary at what had to be minimal rehearsal time, he elicited emotionally commited, and handsomely balanced, if seldom actually transparent, playing from these two professional orchestras, the 10-year-old, Orange County-based one, and the 7-month-old one from Miami.

In an exposing program in which he admirably avoided the pops end of the repertory--it listed Gluck’s Overture to “Iphigenie en Aulide,” Paul Hindemith’s brilliant and neglected “Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber,” and Berlioz’s “Symphonie fantastique”--the 45-year-old Mata led sweeping, convincing performances of apparent aural smoothness. The strings meshed effectively, individual solos emerged as integral parts of the orchestral fabric, and, for the most part, the virtuosic wind choirs avoided raucousness.

Of course there was something anachronistic about the lushness produced by 150 players in the pristine beauties of Gluck. But that lushness, as well as Mata’s sense of dramatic urgency in every interconnected phrase, was hard to resist--practically impossible, in fact.

Indoors, the conductor might be able to sort out the many musical events that occupy Hindemith’s kaleidoscopic score. In this al fresco setting, the inner life of the work never emerged clearly, and all that hyperactivity eventually ran together, like recipe ingredients left too long in the blender.

After an unfocused opening, the “Symphonie fantastique” began to come together in the Waltz movement. Throughout, Mata’s clear pacing and kinetic projection made each succeeding portion seem inevitable. His canny, organized dynamic scheme also paid off: When the orchestra reached the finale, it also reached a plateau of loudness carefully avoided earlier.

Attendance: 5,324 (in an outdoor theater with 10,000 seats, plus additional lawn space accommodating 5,000).