A new era began at the Pasadena Symphony this season with the arrival of Brett Mitchell as music director. The orchestra had been conductorless since the controversial departure in 2021 of David Lockington, who left during a dispute with management over COVID vaccination policies. Mitchell is only the sixth music director in the band’s 97-year history, an impressive record of longevity and continuity in a business that typically sees much more turnover at the top. Jorge Mester, a local legend, led the ensemble for 26 years, from 1984 to 2010.
Judging by the orchestra’s solid performance on Saturday, Jan. 25, at Ambassador Auditorium — the third subscription concert of Mitchell’s inaugural season — the organization is in competent professional and musical hands. An engaging communicator who has already forged a congenial rapport with both the musicians and the audience, Mitchell, who formerly led the Colorado Symphony, created an informal and welcoming atmosphere for this eclectic program of works by Jessie Montgomery, Florence Price, and Mozart. It will take time, of course, to judge Mitchell’s musical vision for the orchestra, which has in the last few years been staging a strong recovery from financial strain and the COVID shutdown.
In brief remarks, he acknowledged the devastating impact of the terrible fires that recently ravaged nearby Altadena and parts of Pasadena and paid tribute to first responders and fire department personnel who had been invited to attend. A heartfelt, if glacially slow, performance of Samuel Barber’s funereal Adagio for Strings followed, an appropriate addition to the scheduled program. “America’s semi-official music for mourning,” as NPR writer Anastasia Tsioulcas has called it, this arrangement for string orchestra of the second movement of the composer’s 1936 String Quartet, Op. 11, has been heard after many tragic occasions.
Another work for string orchestra, Montgomery’s exuberant and cheerful Starburst, cleared the air. Montgomery has said that this energetic curtain-raiser lasting just a little over three minutes is meant to “create a multidimensional soundscape” inspired by the dazzling birth of new stars, represented by jabbing unison string lines and a pulsing rhythmic undercurrent. The Pasadena Symphony strings rose to the occasion, with some occasional stridency.
In recent years, the once nearly forgotten music of Black American composer Florence Price (1887–1953) has become a favorite with orchestra programmers. Price confronted persistent racial and sexist barriers in the conservative world of classical music throughout her sporadic career. Many of her missing scores were rediscovered in an attic chest 56 years after her death, including her Piano Concerto in One Movement, completed in 1932 and performed, with Price as soloist, in Chicago in 1934. Only in 2021 was the original version reconstructed and returned to the repertoire. Despite the concerto’s title, it has three distinct movements, only the first in the work’s key, D minor.
Performed here with intense enthusiasm by Israeli-born pianist Inon Barnatan, the concerto opens unexpectedly with a big solo cadenza that’s immediately reminiscent of Sergei Rachmaninoff, an important influence on Price. The main theme, like most of the material throughout, comes from a Black spiritual. In the second section, the oboist (a somewhat tentative Lara Wickes) engages in a soulful and bluesy duet with the piano, where Barnatan found his groove. Jubilant variations on a Juba dance bring the music home. Appealingly homespun if lacking in technical finesse, the concerto shows Price as a unique voice in American music. Mitchell conducted with energy, but the performance did not quite capture the swing and spontaneity of the style.
Mozart’s final symphony, No. 41 (nicknamed “Jupiter”), anchored the program. An example of the composer’s late “imperial” style, this work — complexly structured around an insistently repeated four-note motif that prefigures Beethoven’s symphonies — requires precise attacks and detailed articulation of the score’s dense polyphony, especially in the concluding movement. Ambassador Auditorium is known for its excellent acoustics, but the placement of the small wind section at the back of the orchestra led to some significant balance problems, with the string sound too dominant. The players did not always seem to be paying close attention to Mitchell’s sweeping and somewhat vague gestures. Overall, however, this was a clean and satisfying performance that received a robust ovation from the hometown crowd.
