MUSIC REVIEW : NEE BRINGS MUSICIANS UP TO SNUFF

Guest conductor Thomas Nee proved Sunday night that the musical remnant of the San Diego Symphony is worth reviving if anyone out there is still interested.

At the East County Performing Arts Center here, Nee’s confident and disciplined leadership took the musicians through Mahler’s Fourth Symphony and Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto. At times, the sonic results brought to mind the orchestra’s heyday before last fall’s apocalyptic events. Though former music director David Atherton rarely programmed Mahler, he was scheduled to conduct an all-Mahler concert last month--but then the 1986-87 season was canceled.

Mahler’s colorful Fourth Symphony showed off the orchestra’s best side, its virtuoso woodwind and horn soloists. Nee captured the composer’s trademark melodic inflection, and he was even able to coax some appropriately warm sonorities out of the lower strings. He kept the lengthy work’s dramatic tension in clear focus, allowing the second movement its playful, bucolic reveries.

What soprano Carol Plantamura lacked in vocal opulence, she compensated with her stylish declamation of the German poetic text in the final movement.

Of course, this was not the glowing, effulgent Mahler brought to San Diego earlier this month by the Chicago Symphony, but the San Diego musicians kept the pulse vital and the sonorities clear. While Nee, a member of the UC San Diego music faculty, is known locally as the music director of the La Jolla Civic-University Orchestra, his finesse on the podium Sunday revealed his conducting pedigree. Before coming to UCSD, Nee was Antol Dorati’s assistant at the Minneapolis Symphony as well as director of the Minneapolis Opera. He is no mere dabbler in conducting.

Pianist Edith Orloff’s bold, energetic Beethoven identified her as a keyboard player of prowess and taste, albeit unrelenting in her approach. In the extended first-movement cadenza, she indulged its pyrotechnics with evident relish, but she stalked the concerto’s slow middle movement with metronomic deliberation. Nee presided over a thoughtful orchestral accompaniment, although the ensemble’s fortes sounded strident rather than majestic.

A snappy reading of Von Reznicek’s airy Viennese confection, the overture to “Donna Diana,” opened the concert.

This program was the final concert of the musicians’ winter miniseries, and at this time no further concerts have been announced. Sunday’s audience was more substantial than those at the two earlier East County concerts, but this series clearly did not live up to the high expectations raised by the series’ Civic Theatre opener last month, which featured Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Thus far, the musicians have not been able to translate the community enthusiasm for a single festive concert into bankable box-office loyalty.