PHILHARMONIC BEGINS 68TH YEAR : SANDERLING, STERN OPEN L.A. SEASON

Although it must sometimes seem to the hard-working musicians that the Los Angeles Philharmonic plays continuously, the workload is actually distributed among traditional subscription seasons. The new winter session--the orchestra’s 68th--opened in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion Thursday night, and a few little extras were invoked in the name of festivity.

Before the concert, on the brightly lighted Plaza, the Moravian Trombone Choir of the Moravian Church of Downey intoned solemn classics while colored clusters of “balloon art” diverted the eye. Inside the hall, pots of exotic blooms lined the footlights, and the American flag was conspicuously displayed while the public sang the National Anthem.

But the real emphasis was where it should be: on the music.

With Kurt Sanderling to conduct the Philharmonic and Isaac Stern to play the Brahms Violin Concerto, the muse was served on a scale that ranged from fair to great.

The greatness was the contribution of the conductor, and things are going to seem awfully dull when his current stint is over. Although it took a long time for the Philharmonic to discover him, he has made indelible impressions on local musical life. He is clearly one of the great ones, and we can only sigh and think, “Better late than never” when considering the wasted years without him.

No conductor has ever flopped with Sibelius’ Second Symphony, but neither has any conductor in this listener’s experience made it sound anything like Sanderling did on this occasion. It was a performance to rival those he has previously offered of Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique,” Bruckner’s Fourth and Beethoven’s Ninth. He has set unalterable standards, and no one who heard those performances will ever be likely to forget them.

Sanderling’s conducting is an art of re-creation. He discovers things in music that have been there all along--if a conductor had the vision to sight them and the skill to bring them to life. Sanderling renders the music and the performance inseparable; the orchestra becomes a living organism, a unity dedicated to a single-minded purpose.

One revels in the sound of the Sanderling orchestra; it is neither excessively lean nor distendedly plushy; it is colorful but it never glares. And without anything close to hysteria or theatricalism, the music becomes irresistibly emotional. The conductor speaks through the composer, but it is always the composer’s voice, not the conductor’s, that commands attention.

The details of the Sibelius Second were arresting, but it was the whole broad canvas, the rise and fall, the ebb and flow, that made the audience stand up and explode with excitement at the end. The tempos were more or less traditional, a little more here, a little less there, but never the slightest distortion. It was the coloring and the phrasing, so quiet but so telling, that dictated breathless attention and participation.

The few liberties were minimal and revealing: What other conductor has made the simple oboe tune of the trio of the Scherzo seem so subtle yet so eloquent? The rhetorical interjections of the slow movement have never sounded so right, the scherzo stirred up a whirlwind, and the jubilations and the swelling crescendos of the finale embodied drama of the first order. The orchestra played magnificently, and the musicians joined their applause with that of the audience.

Stern’s loyal public received him with the usual affection. He brought flashes to the Brahms, but so much was subdued in tone and manner that the subtleties tended to disappear in the open spaces of the Pavilion. The Joachim cadenza found the violinist in more aggressive form. Elsewhere, Sanderling was forced to repress the orchestra unduly to meet Stern’s intimate conception, but the orchestral passages were models of warmly mellow Brahms. David Weiss’ oboe sang the introduction to the Adagio in admirable style.

Sanderling opened the evening with a rousing “Meistersinger” Prelude, one in which the typical Sanderling clarity found a grateful challenge in the Wagnerian counterpoint.