Dance and Music : Falletta Conducts Liszt Rarities in Long Beach

On paper, the latest program put together by music director JoAnn Falletta for her Long Beach Symphony seemed like a collection of bits and pieces: short, sectionalized and/or fragmented works lined up like pint-sized milk bottles trying to make a gallon.

In the event, Saturday night in Terrace Theater at the Long Beach Convention Center, all those fragments seemed to create a totality not unpleasant on the ear. And the closing work, Elgar’s “Enigma” Variations, swept the entire event together.

The first Los Angeles-area performance of Franz Liszt’s recently exhumed Piano Concerto in E-flat, Opus posthumous--first heard in Chicago in the spring of 1990, it reached Santa Barbara soon after--had the advocacy of Canadian pianist Janina Fialkowska, a musician of taste, refinement and orderly technique, but an uncompelling keyboard presence.

Fialkowska performed efficiently and with an ear for Lisztian sonorities, but failed to demonstrate why this long-lost, irritatingly short-breathed work should ever enter the repertory. If it has charms, Fialkowska did not illuminate them.

Her subsequent playing of the same composer’s “Totentanz” put both composer and soloist in a better light. Perhaps it’s a better piece. Falletta and the game Long Beach ensemble accompanied handsomely and alertly.

The evening began with a strong run-through of original ballet music from the 1940s, “Medea’s Meditation and Dance of Vengeance” by Samuel Barber.

It ended with a usually well-paced--Falletta sometimes likes to race--emotionally resonant, in moments unfocused reading of Elgar’s wondrous “Enigma” Variations. Tempo controversies aside, the conductor made the journey from start to finish eminently sensible.