END-OF-SEASON BLAHS : DE WAART RETURNS TO PHILHARMONIC

The Los Angeles Philharmonic is limping and lumbering to the end of a trying, vicissitudinous, music-directorless season, and the strain is beginning to show.

Thursday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Edo de Waart (replacing Guenter Wand, who was to have replaced Carlo Maria Giulini) conducted the Brucker Fourth Symphony (replacing the Mozart Requiem and “Figaro” Overture). The soloist was Rudolf Buchbinder (replacing Rudolf Serkin), who played Mozart’s Concerto in C, K. 503 (replacing the Concerto in E-flat, K. 482).

The dauntless maestro seemed to want to concentrate on speed and clarity; he got the speed. The pianist seemed content, much of the time, just to reproduce the right notes; much of the time he did.

Although the brass enjoyed moments of wonted stentorian glory, the weary orchestra tended to play for its 12th conductor of the season as if its only important goal was to reach the final cadence unscathed. It did reach the final cadence.

This was a nervous evening. Nothing went dangerously wrong. Nothing went deliriously right.

In the Mozart concerto, De Waart provided a light and tight frame for Buchbinder’s rather casual traversal of the solo lines. The pianist raced through the opening allegro, encountered some coordination problems with the orchestra in a distinctly prosaic andante, and began to hint at his real capabilities in the elegant, rippling flourishes of the rondo finale.

In the Bruckner symphony, a Philharmonic specialty since Zubin Mehta’s heyday, De Waart obviously intended to minimize the rhetorical sprawl, to untangle the melodic knots wherever possible, and to make the mighty outburst sound like inevitable climaxes rather than pompous indulgences. Bless him for all that.

Unfortunately, the orchestra at his command seemed recalcitrant, ragged, unresponsive. It made a major noise and, on occasion, a minor mess. For more than an hour, the convoluted, hyper-Germanic ultra-romantic indulgence ground onward, but it seldom soared upward.