LEONTYNE PRICE SINGS STRAUSS : SANDERLING AT SEGERSTROM HALL

“There are no such things as insensitive halls, only insensitive conductors.”

I think Confucius said it. Or maybe it was Goethe.

In any case, the wisdom rang true Wednesday night at Segerstrom Hall in the glamorous and adventurous Orange County Performing Arts Center.

At the supergala, ultra-brouhaha, be-seen-but-don’t-listen, oh-so-grand opening Monday, Zubin Mehta had returned to the podium of the Los Angeles Philharmonic for a one-night stand.

Like many another one-nighter, the encounter proved more notable for flash than for introspection. It made a mighty noise, but hardly furthered the cause of meditation. It confused bravado with spiritual uplift, muscle with pathos.

Wednesday, for a splashy event labeled Founders Night, the baton passed to a less flamboyant, less well-publicized but eminently persuasive conductor: Kurt Sanderling.

He happens to be a gentleman embroiled in what looks--and sounds--like an ongoing love affair with the Philharmonic.

The venerated German master, a consummate technician and an artist touched with a sense of Old World poetry, didn’t just make the orchestra sound better. He made the hall sound better.

Did he manage to solve all the problems posed at the opening? Answer all the vexing questions?

No. From a good seat in Row M, halfway back on the downstairs level, the cellos and basses still lacked presence. The winds tended toward dullness. The strings seemed a bit edgy.

But one felt warmth on this occasion, even mellowness. One could define inner voices. One savored transparent textures and delicate balances.

Most telling, perhaps, one heard shimmering pianissimos and crashing fortissimos, yet both dynamic extremes were projected without distortion.

There is hope.

Sanderling threatened to open the program with a yawn: Schubert’s overpopular “Unfinished” Symphony. Other conductors feed it to easily pleased audiences these days as if it were so much musical junk food, and Orange County certainly can boast an easily pleased audience.

Sanderling, however, isn’t like other conductors. He approaches Schubert’s lyricism as if the world had never heard it before. He plays it with exceptional clarity and grace, with gentle momentum, with plenty of breathing space and obvious affection.

He plays it as if it were chamber music.

The maestro obviously wanted to stress comparable intimate qualities in the twilight rhetoric of Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs. But here he had to contend with a soloist who happened to have different interpretive ideas and, perhaps, less than ideal vocal resources.

Leontyne Price is one of the great divas of our time. Everyone knows that.

Until her recent retirement from opera, she was internationally celebrated for her glorious sound--especially at the top--as allied with her special statuesque dignity and her ability to convey urgency with generalized emotive devices.

These qualities never made her an ideal exponent of the German Lied, where subtlety of expression and verbal point far outweigh the importance of gorgeous tones.

At 59, Price retains reasonable control of a still-extraordinary instrument, and the Segerstrom acoustic treated her kindly. Unfortunately, she didn’t probe very deep into the heartbreaking sentiment at hand.

She sounded radiant one moment, husky the next. Her tones were sometimes lush and sometimes dry. Her aim proved impeccable in one passage, errant in another.

Most damaging, she reduced the eloquent texts to so much mush.

After intermission, and after a sartorial switch from verdant drapery to black glitz, she ventured the final scene from Strauss’ “Salome.”

Price never impersonated Oscar Wilde’s virginal necrophile on the opera stage, and that may have been just as well. The gleaming climaxes pose no problem for her, even now, but the character of the innocent voluptuary eludes her.

Salome may have been princess of Judaea. Still, she wasn’t a prima donna.

Sanderling, who had coaxed a whiz-bangy yet sensuous “Dance of the Seven Veils” out of the Philharmonic, provided poised, ultimately rapturous accompaniment for the erotic apostrophe to the severed head of John the Baptist.

INCIDENTAL INTELLIGENCE:

1--If Orange County ever gets around to staging “Salome,” or any other large-scale Strauss, or Berlioz, or Wagner, there may be problems. The orchestra pit in the $70-million house is designed to accommodate only 85 players. So much for multipurpose myopia.

2--The elegant local audiences still don’t know that they shouldn’t muster mood-shattering applause between movements of a symphony, or after individual songs in a tightly knit set.

3--The local management doesn’t seem to deem it worthwhile to list repertory in its ads. The name of the artist, apparently, suffices. That may change if and when the public comes to hear music and not just to gaze at stars or inspect an edifice.

4--The national (and international) press has all but snubbed the Orange County opening. The rest of the world still seems to think that nothing culturally important can happen unless it happens in New York. The New York Times, which virtually ignored the Olympic Arts Festival, sent a music critic to Amsterdam this week, not to Costa Mesa.