Music Reviews : Long Beach Symphony Displays Virtues

If virtuosity--like virtue--is its own reward, the Long Beach Symphony seems to be striking it rich this season.

At the orchestra’s fifth concert of 1989-90, Saturday night in Terrace Theater at the Long Beach Convention Center, music director JoAnn Falletta led a satisfying and unhackneyed program that clearly displayed the achievement of the ensemble. That program consisted of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, played by concertmaster Kathleen Lenski, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s Concerto Grosso (1985) and Respighi’s “Feste Romane.”

Genuine brilliance--the kind of weighty, full-out orchestral performance that cannot be faked or approximated, only achieved--marked the climactic and resourceful performance Falletta & Co. brought to the Respighi pieces. Finding all the contrasting quiet places and utilizing to best advantage the gifted first-desk players of the ensemble had a lot to do with this success too.

There was also great show in the orchestra’s account of Zwilich’s colorful, five-movement essay--written as an homage to Handel on his 300th anniversary, but an unconscious tribute to Bartok and Britten, as well. The Concerto Grosso is a work of many resonances, and it sweeps the listener along breathlessly. This performance--which outlined reconciliation as the true emotional and musical subject of the piece--seemed to touch all bases.

To begin any program with a masterpiece is no sin, of course. Still, starting this one with the Violin Concerto of Beethoven seemed arbitrary.

Lenski’s solo performance proved positively immaculate and mechanically unassailable but not always stylish or noble: Both she and conductor Falletta failed to achieve the rhythmic steadiness that gives the opening movement its strength and character, for instance. And a certain standoffishness marked the entire performance, which nonetheless moved from beginning to end with authority.