MUSIC REVIEW : INTREPID PROGRAM FINDS SYMPHONY IN GOOD FORM

No one is likely to accuse David Atherton of hackneyed programming. While the San Diego Symphony’s music director is too prudent to play the iconoclast, he has no qualms treading the road not taken.

Thursday evening at the Civic Theatre, the intrepid Atherton offered the seldom-played Second Symphony by Edward Elgar, along with two concertante works for solo saxophone. Fortunately, the orchestra was in top form and the guest saxophonist a virtuoso. Whatever the pieces may have lacked in profundity, the performers compensated for it with more than a fair measure of brilliance.

In his version of the Elgar, Atherton underscored its latent Straussian hyperbole, keeping both energy and dynamics at a consistently high level. While this approach turned Elgar’s grandiloquent monument into an Edwardian “Heldenleben,” it tolerated only the slightest acquiescence to the score’s more meditative, introspective landscapes. There were quiet moments, but each was tightly controlled.

Atherton emphasized the brilliance of the brasses and drew a muscular but not unpleasant response from the strings. The orchestra has seldom shown such cohesion and broad, resonant sonorities.

British saxophonist John Harle brought to the Debussy Rhapsodie a purity of tone and subtlety of line that belied the composer’s evident lack of conviction for this unorthodox work. Unlike the tremulous, sensuous timbre usually associated with his instrument, Harle cultivated an opaque and essentially vibrato-free tone color more like that of a French horn than a woodwind. Only in the saxophone’s highest range and loudest dynamic levels did a tinge of enervating vibrato enter.

In the Debussy, the orchestra supplied a most accommodating complement to Harle, allowing a flexible pulse to shape the piece with gentle contours and deft interweaving of lines.

Jacques Ibert’s jazzy, neo-classical bauble, the “Concertino for Alto Saxophone,” proved less endearing than the Debussy. As a composition, it’s just too slick for its own good. As Harle and the chamber-sized ensemble from the orchestra spun out the busy pseudo-counterpoint, it was difficult to efface memories of countless dated film scores. Atherton gave the outer movements a brassy, high-gloss sound, and Harle supplied a seamless effusion of ornamentation. While his agility was never in question, the composer’s intentions prompted a certain disbelief.

To open the program, Atherton and the orchestra gave a refreshingly clean, bold reading of Berlioz’s tempestuous “Roman Carnival” Overture. This program will be repeated at 8 o’clock tonight at the East County Performing Arts Center in El Cajon.