Music Reviews : Mester Leads Valente, Pasadena Symphony

The deeply coherent program that Jorge Mester put together Saturday for his Pasadena Symphony and soprano Benita Valente embraced folk music as a unifying power--a wondrous one, in the 20-Century context at hand.

After all, it was the sweet pathos and aching innocence of such music that inspired Mahler, whose Fourth Symphony became the evening’s focus at Civic Auditorium, as well as Canteloube, whose “Songs of the Auvergne” served as a preface.

Even Henry Cowell’s “Hymn and Fuguing Tune” No. 3, bluff and straightforward in its Americana revivalism, helped complete the picture, although as a less provocative contrast to the agenda’s prevailing Eurocentrism than Charles Ives would have made.

Otherwise, there could be no quibble. The orchestra rose to lofty heights for its greatest challenge, the Mahler, and Mester, who made clarity a virtue throughout, was not afraid to stretch those last high-tension phrases in the slow movement to their sublime tether.

He also coaxed a lean, shimmering tone from the strings and solid contributions from the brass in his alert, generally muscular account of this work that has a built-in emotional landscape.

Valente, with her purity of tone and gleaming lyric buoyancy, was the perfect purveyor of Mahlerian vulnerability for the fourth movement solo. Curiously, she found the low notes comfortable here, while rendering similar ones in five of the Auvergne songs nearly inaudible.

Still, the whole range from nostalgia to insouciance was hers to illuminate in this evening of illuminations.