AN INSPIRED MATCH : SANDERLING CONDUCTS BRAHMS FIRST

“Oh, no,” muttered that nasty little voice within me, “not another Brahms First Symphony!”

But it wasn’t just another Brahms First. Anything but.

Thursday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, it was a Brahms First surging with strength and passion, with freshness and poignancy. It was a Brahms First remarkable for its breadth, warmth and majesty. It was overwhelmingly heroic, massively dramatic, daringly lyrical, unbelievably flexible.

It was tellingly detailed yet ever-respectful of the grand line and the ultimate climax. It was perfectly proportioned.

It was the Brahms First as delineated by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the inspired guidance of an old German master: Kurt Sanderling.

Other conductors may coax greater degrees of precision out of the orchestra. Others certainly concern themselves more with easy effects, with podium calisthenics and whiz-bang bravura.

But few, if any, convey the inherent romantic asethetic with the combination of calm authority and urgent enthusiasm that illuminates Sanderling’s performance.

In a day dominated by efficient baton mechanics at one extreme and overwrought podium clowns at the other, Sanderling remains a marvelous misfit--a poet. Without muss and fuss, without undue sentimentality or excessive thunder, he projects every facet of the composer’s expressive rhetoric. Although he favors unusually dark, rich sonorities, he never plods, never loses his sense of purpose and direction, never allows tensions to sag.

When it comes to this repertory, he deals in revelations.

When it comes to the leaner, more poised and elegant sonorities one associates with Haydn and Mozart, he may be a bit less persuasive. At least, he seemed somewhat less impressive in the Haydn and Mozart that comprised the first half of this program.

In Haydn’s Symphony No. 39, he applied gales of Sturm and waves of Drang that nearly invoked premature visions of Mahler. It was undeniably exciting, in its heavy, boldly anachronistic way; but it wasn’t very stylish.

Similar broad strokes and aggressive accents threatened to distort Mozart’s Oboe Concerto, K. 314. Heinz Holliger played the ornate solo lines, however, with such refinement, such delicacy, such nonchalant charm and such breathless bravura that Sanderling--an artistic chameleon of the highest order--soon abandoned his 19th-Century inclinations and assumed the manners of a consummate classicist.

What began as something of an interpretive mismatch ended as a joyous, mutually sensitive collaboration.

The guest conductor, incidentally, preserved Andre Previn’s new seating pattern for the first half of the program, then asked the violas and cellos to switch places for the Brahms. The change didn’t seem to make much of a sonic difference.