SINOPOLI AT AMBASSADOR : PHILHARMONIA ORCHESTRA PERFORMS

In early 1974, the Ambassador International Cultural Foundation began as an impresarial firm by importing its first orchestra to the new Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena. That was the Vienna Symphony, then playing under Carlo Maria Giulini.

Twelve and one-half years and many symphonic bodies later, the foundation, beginning an Ambassador season for the first time without its leader, Herbert Armstrong (who died in January), opened the 1986-87 series by importing yet another European ensemble. That was the Philharmonia Orchestra, under its current principal conductor, Giuseppe Sinopoli.

Saturday night, while the summer season at Hollywood Bowl continued apace, Sinopoli and his London-based orchestra, though dressed in summer whites, turned to an autumnal program: the Second Symphony of Robert Schumann and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth.

(Incidentally, this appearance, which early on had been called a West Coast debut in the Ambassador ads, was actually a second appearance here. The Philharmonia, founded in 1945, first visited Southern California in February, 1984, when it played two concerts in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the Music Center.)

From Sinopoli, who has sometimes seemed a wild character on the podium, this performance with his own orchestra showed surprising reservoirs of restraint and apparently maximal control over his forces; also, that most cherishable of conductorial tools, a probing and organized mind.

The bearded Italian conductor still sends what look like undecipherable messages with his left hand, messages his players probably discount, if they pay any attention to them at all. But those same players certainly receive the right sorts of instructions from somewhere, for they play with a mastery and unanimity that can be stunning.

As delivered single-mindedly by the Philharmonia and led purposefully by Sinopoli, Schumann’s impassioned, exuberant Second Symphony emerged with its ambiguities and complexities clearly detailed. There was breadth and urgency, and no emotional waffling, in the opening movement; breathtaking accuracy in the scherzo; exquisite anguish (and gorgeous string tone) in the slow movement; unfeigned resolution in the finale.

Equally important to orchestra-fanciers--many of whom seemed to be present in the crowded hall--was the level of instrumental achievement on display. The Philharmonia’s resonance is not a transparent one; its balances are not clinically maintained or coldly applied. Rather, it plays as an entity, each choir contributing to the overall, completely integrated sound. But within that sound, every element seems right, and planned, and purposeful.

All those virtues combined in Sinopoli’s re-thought, re-imagined approach to Tchaikovsky’s over-familiar Fifth Symphony. For once--and one hesitates to think how long it has been since the work seemed irresistible--this tuneful, really beguiling, piece escaped its usual banality, lugubriousness and empty rhetoric.

Instead, Sinopoli and his willing Londoners gave it a fresh emotionalism, a sense of continuity, an immaculate sound-profile and the right amounts of push. One waited in vain for the boring and pedestrian parts--they never came.