MUSIC REVIEW : London Symphony Performs at the Center

Michael Tilson Thomas led his London Symphony in an evening of astringent, cerebral music-making Monday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

Tilson Thomas offered “Flourish with Fireworks,” written by his friend Oliver Knussen as a homage to the conductor; Stravinsky’s wartime, war-fraught Symphony in Three Movements, and Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique,” which he had conducted at El Camino College on Sunday.

Tilson Thomas displayed such virtues as precision, control, enforcement of textual transparency and rhythmic exactitude.

Still, the 44-year-old Tilson Thomas, who has been principal conductor of the orchestra for only half a year, seemed far more calculating than spontaneous. He inclined toward intensifying and compacting energy rather than creating a sense of sweeping flow.

He skillfully traced Knussen’s Stravinsky-indebted fanfare, a 2-minute work that takes as much time to describe as to conduct.

He began Stravinsky’s Symphony with evocations of a ponderous war machine but failed to unify the abrupt transitions or build to a convincing triumph.

The orchestra, which produced lean, glassy string tone and some braying from the brass, was quick to respond to the conductor’s direction. It proved alert and precise in difficult rhythmic passages and unified in making a mighty, if not a sumptuous, noise.

Perhaps it was the fierce, electric energy evoked in the last movement of Berlioz’s Symphony--which was reviewed previously--that induced the audience to call Tilson Thomas back with enough enthusiasm to elicit Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 1 as an encore.

The concert was sponsored by the Orange County Philharmonic Society.