Most San Diegans who care about orchestral music will have no hesitancy agreeing that the San Diego Symphony traded up when they hired Jahja Ling as conductor after Jung-Ho Pak’s tenure. Many might go so far as to consider Pak a placeholder who bridged the Talmi and Ling years, a competent placeholder nonetheless with the specter of bankruptcy lurking in the wings. Yet, lest we forget, Pak did two extremely memorable things which should earn him a legitimate place in the history of the San Diego Symphony as a talented musician.

The first was the extraordinary performance he led of Tan Dun’s Symphony 1997: Heaven Earth Mankind, a free concert in a parking lot in Balboa Park involving not just the Symphony musicians, but also Felix Fan on cello, red fish blue fish (playing replicas of bells almost 2-1/2-millenia-old), the San Diego Children’s Chorus, and a CD player.

The second was his conversion of unremarkable outreach programs into the engaging Light Bulb Series. Outreach or family concerts are normally the province of an assistant or guest conductor, but Pak oversaw these himself. On this series, he effectively combined his gift for gab from the podium with unusual programming that featured lots of contemporary compositions, and which brought soloists from the jazz, popular, and ethnic music worlds to collaborate with the San Diego Symphony.

A perusal of the San Diego Chamber Orchestra’s current season, planned and executed by Pak, suggests that he has attempted to duplicate the success of the Light Bulb Series, exploring themes such as a traversal of “the most famous Baroque pieces ever written,” a concert built around “surprise” which involved commissioning an original work for theremin and orchestra, and another program featuring 6 different Russian composers. The January 14 concert at Sherwood Auditorium, built around the topic of the seasons, illustrated the pros and cons of such an approach.

A chief advantage of such a Light-Bulb-like program—at least to an eclectic listener—is diversity. Where else could one hear a crazy-quilt concert of works by Tchaikovsky, Piazzolla, Boismortier, Mark O’Connor, Haydn, Vivaldi, Glazunov, and Cage? That’s right, John Cage. It’s the first time since I moved to San Diego back in 1985 that a professional orchestra has performed Cage here, and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that this was the first professional orchestral performance of Cage in San Diego, period. From this programmatic bouillabaisse, the only two works one might encounter on a typical local concert would be Vivaldi’s Summer from The Four Seasons, and an aria from Haydn’s The Seasons. (Come to think of it, when’s the last time Haydn’s complete oratorio was given a professional performance locally?) It’s always a treat to hear a worthwhile yet neglected work given a good live performance.

But there’s the catch: by throwing so much unfamiliar music at the musicians, the quality of the performances suffered. Tempos were too slow, phrasing was tentative, and coordination was rough at times.

Violinist Lindsay Deutsch was one of two featured soloists on the program. Deutsch’s competence and versatility has graced San Diego in the past, and she did not disappoint here either. In assaying Piazzolla’s Winter in Buenos Aires, from the tango master’s sly yet heartfelt The Four Seasons, Deutsch channeled Gidon Kremer (who in turned channeled the violinists in Piazzolla’s bands) with idiomatic upward swoops, scratchy crunches evocative of a guiro or rattle, and throbbing vibratos reminiscent of dance-hall tenors. She sometimes got ever so slightly ahead of her accompanying string ensemble, a no-no for classical musicians but an exciting technique found in folk and popular music all over the globe.

Deutsch captured the typical bluegrass mannerisms of her part in Mark O’Connor’s Spring, and later, if any listeners harbored doubts about her legitimacy (classical, that is, not her parents’ marital status), she turned in a bravura rendition of Vivaldi’s Summer.

Soprano Katherine Blumenthal joined the orchestra for a happy account of the pastoral mannerisms of Haydn’s Welche Labung Fur Die Sinne! (How Pleasing To The Senses), a vocal and more rarified cousin to Vivaldi’s humid evocation of long, fecund days (as well as Piazzolla’s—the Southern hemisphere’s winter is our summer). Blumenthal’s other solo was a luxuriantly sung paean to love, the “Air” from the Spring section of Joseph Bodin de Boismortier’s The Four Seasons, with an accompaniment of violin, flute, cello, and harpsichord, pleasantly performed by all participants.

The music of Boismortier is rarely encountered on symphony programs, for good reason—outside of a few stage works, he really didn’t compose much for large ensembles. He made his mark (and quite a bit of money) in writing chamber music, and to this day wind players program his pleasant pieces on their recitals. The excerpt chosen for this concert was typical of Boismortier’s vocal music (rarely heard anywhere), a tuneful, straightforward da capo aria, far more influenced by the Italian opera or cantatas of the time—the early 18^th-century—than by the fleeting sensual indulgences of the French music of his day.

Both Glazunov and Tchaikovsky titled works of theirs The Seasons. Tchaikovsky’s suite, originally composed for piano (the arranger was uncredited in the program), actually depicts the twelve months. Southern Californians might not associate Russian winters with frivolity, but the Shrovetide Festival brought a carnival atmosphere to the otherwise gloomy month of February in St. Petersburg. The merry outer sections of February reflect this happy time, while the slower inner section is more reflective, perhaps suggestive of cold long nights.

Glazunov was the sole musical spokesperson for fall on Pak’s program. He composed a ballet on the seasons; we heard the last two movements of the work, Petit Adagio and Bacchanale, and the music is pretty much what you’d expect a conservative late 19^th-century composer to produce with those titles. In his preceding comments on this work, Pak mentioned that the themes of the other seasons are recapitulated, but without hearing them, how could listeners identify them? The opening tutti section was unfocused, a recurrent problem with the SDCO under Pak’s direction, particularly in the unforgiving acoustics of Sherwood Hall. He should consider putting an assistant in the center seats to check the sonic blend. Winds and brass overpowered the strings in the opening, and were shrill in the final measures. On the other hand, the string section, problematic earlier in O’Connor, Cage, and Vivaldi, sounded fine in the Petit Adagio, producing a lush, warm tone.

I’ve written at length elsewhere about Mark O’Connor’s strengths and liabilities as a composer, and Spring from The American Seasons does nothing to change my opinion. While O’Connor captures the flavor of country fiddling, the form into which he pours his at times appealing ideas just doesn’t convince. The music meanders along, stopping and starting aimlessly. There was a nice fugal passage which almost sounded like Steve Reich, but it ultimately came to dead stop. O’Connor never transitions from one idea to the next; everyone just cadences, and suddenly we’re in a new section. To summarize, O’Connor has raw talent, but he really needs some composition lessons.

Audience members may have been surprised that that infamous boogie-man of 20^th-century music, John Cage, produced such a delightful piece as Spring (technically, there is a Prelude to Spring which was performed as well). The truth of the matter is that there is a body of work by Cage which is accessible, beautiful, tranquil music using consonant collections of notes (although the soothing harmonies do not operate according to previous laws, except perhaps for any undiscovered methods which lay behind the intuitive choices Satie and Thomson made). A large bulk of these transcendentally lovely works were written in the mid-to-late 1940s, after the percussion ensemble and prepared piano works that first gained him notoriety, but before the notorious Music of Changes (1951), where Cage relinquished most of his compositional decisions to chance procedures. For years these transitional works were overlooked, but over the past two decades many performers have committed themselves to programming these gentle gems, pieces such as Four Walls, the String Quartet in 4 Parts, In a Landscape, Six Melodies for violin and piano, and The Seasons (which was first composed for piano, and subsequently orchestrated). Cage’s interpretation of spring evokes, inadvertently no doubt, the burbling woodwinds in the opening measures of that most notorious musical illustration of the vernal equinox, Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps. At the same time, those pentatonic gurgles eerily foreshadow by four decades similar types of harmonically static yet rhythmically ecstatic passages in Asian-American composers such as Chinary Ung.

One of the drawbacks of a program consisting of grazing on an excerpt or two from a larger number of works is that listeners do not get to experience the musical moment as the composer intended it to be heard. I’ve already alluded to the inability to appreciate Glazunov’s re-introduction of earlier themes in the ending movements of his ballet. When you hear Haydn’s Welche Labung as the 17^th number in an evening-long oratorio, it’s not simply a delightful tune, but rather serves as a warm-up to the rousing choral conclusion of the first half of a concert program.

Perhaps no piece on Pak’s program suffered more from this excerpting than the two movements from Cage’s The Seasons. As in other works from this period (The Seasons was composed in 1947), Cage based his compositions on rhythmic proportions which permeate all levels of the piece. In The Seasons, he used a pattern of 2 2 1 3 2 4 1 3 1. This is manifested at the smallest level through the use of rhythms which musically translate that numerical sequence. Within an entire section, the length of each phrase coincides with the proportion of each number to the whole sequence, eg. the first phrase (2) is as long as the second phrase (2 again); the third phrase (1), is half as long as the second phrase, and so forth. There are nine sections to The Seasons (a prelude precedes each season, with a recap of the the first prelude as an epilogue), and each section reflects the above proportions. By giving us 2 slices of 9 sections (we heard the 3^rd and 4^th sections), the overall proportion of the work is lost. Here’s the paradox—there was no other work on the concert in which the excerpt so well represented the entire composition.

For a copy of the program (please see the above review for changes), click here.