PASADENA, Calif. — The Pasadena Symphony Orchestra — that venerable and, at times, formidable competitor to the lords of Bunker Hill on the other end of the Arroyo Seco Parkway, the Los Angeles Philharmonic — has a new music director, Brett Mitchell. But what a long, rocky road the orchestra has traveled to get to his first concerts on the job in Pasadena’s storied, lavishly furnished Ambassador Auditorium on Oct. 26.
Let’s briefly recap the journey. (For more details on the PSO’s remarkable history, go here.) First, the Great Recession of 2008 nearly did the PSO in, forcing budget and salary cuts. Following the controversial departure in 2010 of esteemed music director Jorge Mester after 25 years on the job — he either quit or was dismissed after re-negotiations of his contract failed to come to fruition — the orchestra was basically leaderless for three years. James DePreist served as artistic adviser for a while, but when he died in February 2013 there was still no music director on board. A month later, the PSO settled on an experienced British expatriate, David Lockington, as music director with fellow ex-pat 18th-century music maven Nicholas McGegan as principal guest conductor. The orchestra seemed satisfied with Lockington, who received two contract renewals.
Then came the pandemic in 2020, and everything everywhere came to a grinding halt. But when it was time to go back to work in 2021, it was announced that Lockington was taking a “leave of absence.” In reality, Lockington, a Christian Scientist, had been fired for refusing to be vaccinated against COVID, seeking a religious and medical exemption while following other mandates like masking and submitting to COVID tests. Lockington then sued the PSO for wrongful dismissal in January 2023, a case that was finally settled out of court in December of that year. Meanwhile, another three-year search and yet another revolving door of guest conductors ensued before Mitchell, who had appeared before the orchestra in March 2022 and October 2023, was selected for the job in March 2024.
A well-traveled guest conductor, Mitchell has a long list of credits, rising from assistant to associate conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra and serving as music director of the Colorado Symphony from 2017 to 2021. Coincidentally, Lockington was once the Colorado orchestra’s assistant principal cellist before Mitchell got there. Like Lockington, Mitchell is also a composer in his spare time. His contract with the PSO runs for five years, until its centennial season in 2028-29.
To start off his first concerts (the PSO plays at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. on the same day; I went to the later performance), Mitchell turned to Peter Boyer, a former PSO composer-in-residence who lives in Altadena, the next town up the road. You would think with a title like New Beginnings that this was a newly commissioned Boyer fanfare for the Mitchell era, yet it actually dates from 2000, and Mitchell had conducted it before in Houston and Denver.
The piece sure sounded like a call to glory at first, not unlike John Williams’ ubiquitous Olympic Fanfare, but it soon began to glitter and segue calmly into a TV movie-like passage before the engines revved up again, eventually dying down to a lone flute. With Latin percussion, odd meters, and a return to the opening theme, everything came to a socko close. While the PSO sounded raw and raucous in the beginning, the playing improved noticeably in the slow middle section.
The concerto portion of this orthodox overture-concerto-intermission-symphony program also had a local angle — Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s lovable Violin Concerto, whose well-developed themes stem directly from four of his genre-defining Hollywood film scores.
Akiko Suwanai was the soloist, signaling her intent by refusing to indulge in excess sentiment in the opening bars, her medium-sized tone not in tune at first but growing more assured and singing more sweetly as the piece went on. The PSO, staffed as it is with expert studio players, sounded expectedly at home in these post-romantic waters while keeping the music away from the high-fructose corn syrup.
For the symphony portion of the program, Mitchell served up Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 as the inaugural showpiece. Indeed, Mahler seems to have been the favored composer for a lot of season openings this fall: A browse through the listings indicates that the First was done in Atlanta as well as in Pasadena, the Second in San Diego, the Third in Philadelphia, the Fifth in New York City, Fort Wayne, and Nashville, and the Eighth in Boston.
Mitchell’s was a workmanlike performance, predominately slow in tempos. Except for a single humorous cue to the violins, the third movement sounded more genuinely funereal than satirical. I can’t say that Mitchell brought many new or striking insights to Mahler, yet there was one departure from the norm: The entire double bass section played the minor-key parody of “Frere Jacques” in the opening of the third movement instead of just a solo bass as marked. It worked.
The PSO generally played at a high level all night under Mitchell, with a clear yet warm sound and a well-defined bass range. However, the horns seemed to tire in the last movement of the Mahler after playing marvelously earlier in the symphony. I can’t really blame them: They had to play this nearly hour-long symphony twice in one day at performance level, not to mention the rest of the program. That’s a lot to ask.
In wielding the baton overall, Mitchell seemed more communicative and flowing when the tempos were broad and the volumes levels low, whereas he looked ungainly and rigid in his motions when the tempos and decibels were up. He appeared eager to make himself at home with his new audience, even enthusiastically relaying the final score of the World Series game that had just finished a few miles south.
Also it struck me that Ambassador Auditorium sounded surprisingly dry. The hall always seemed adequately reverberant to me when I was a regular visitor during its heyday from the late 1970s through the early 1990s, when the world’s top musicians like Nathan Milstein, Vladimir Horowitz, Dave Brubeck, the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics, to name but a few, trod its boards.
