MUSIC REVIEW : Erb, Stravinsky on Cleveland Program

COSTA MESA â€”  An oddball program notwithstanding, the second appearance by the Cleveland Orchestra in Segerstrom Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center had to be counted as another triumph for the touring ensemble.

Christoph von Dohnanyi, the ensemble’s music director since 1984, put together this strange agenda for the Wednesday night concert; it listed Schubert’s rarely exhumed Overture to “Alfonso und Estrella,� Donald Erb’s Concerto for Brass and Orchestra (1987) and Stravinsky’s complete ballet score, “The Firebird.�

In the event, he conducted it in a manner both masterly and engrossing; throughout this generous, but not overlong, evening, the orchestra performed splendidly, and with the deepest concentration.

Even so, the combination of works seemed more a disturbing mix of unmeshing musical statements than a viable program.

Schubert’s wondrous, alternately portentous and lighthearted overture to his ill-fated opera of 1822 set the stage for Erb’s sometimes surreal and nightmarish big-orchestra piece, but only by contrast.

Stravinsky’s full “Firebird� score, colorfully and immaculately performed after intermission--here, Dohnanyi achieved an almost cinematic sense of continuity--displayed no particular kinship with what had preceded it.

Still, these apparently egoless readings--no willfulness or Karajanisms from the podium, no gratuitous brilliance from the orchestra, only a benign truthfulness and precision in the playing--had to be their own reward both for players and listeners. One heard the music, not the performances. And one heard it all in a transparent and probing aural light.

Most interesting was Erb’s atonal, virtuosic, 20-minute Concerto, a showpiece for the entire orchestra--but, of course, especially the brass--which owes something to Bartok’s model, but more to the American composer’s fervid imagination.

Its three movements may be considered a disparate series of bad dreams, each with its own individual climax; the outer ones peak dynamically, the middle one in the eerie appearance of a Bach chorale (“Alle Menschen mussen sterben�), which suddenly, frighteningly, rises out of the aural haze. One doesn’t need to recognize the chorale-tune (All Men must die) to get the message.