Music Review : Symphony Tackles Sibelius Opus With Drive, Intensity

Seasoned travelers often refer to the Finnish capital city of Helsinki as the poor man’s Leningrad. Hearing the San Diego Symphony perform Sibelius’ First Symphony on Friday evening at Symphony Hall brought to mind a parallel comparison. With all of its brooding, melancholic meanderings, this early Sibelius opus is indeed the poor man’s Tchaikovsky.

Guest conductor Sixten Ehrling guided the orchestra over this stark Nordic landscape with great conviction, but the result was less convincing that last week’s thoroughly integrated traversal of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony under Maxim Shostakovich. Though the 69-year-old Ehrling’s bearing is that of an avuncular aristocrat, his conducting technique had the awkward appearance of a gangly schoolmaster.

The players easily caught the Swedish conductor’s spirit, but when precision was crucial to the musical fabric, his odd gestures seriously mitigated against the cleanly honed cut-off or precise entrance. Throughout the Sibelius, the orchestra supplied in drive and intensity what it lacked in refinement, although principal clarinetist David Peck’s haunting opening solo could not have been more deft or evocative.

Prior to the intermission Ruggiero Ricci trotted out Max Bruch’s hoary “Scottish Fantasy” with decidedly mixed results. In the slow movements, the gentle purity of his tone and his graceful phrases shaped by a keen, intuitive rubato were indeed winning. When faced with the finale’s technical challenges, however, his passage work was frequently reduced to mere approximation, and his intonation wavered a few times too often for listening comfort.

Ricci and Ehrling were not always of the same mind when it came to tempos. Ehrling tended to select a more sedate, plodding pace, while Ricci pressed for a more flexible, driving approach. The orchestra’s accompaniment was broad and thoughtful in the slow sections and vital in the spritely ones. But this reading of Bruch’s chestnut was not one to cherish.

Ehrling opened the concert with Weber’s Overture to “Euryanthe,” which the orchestra delivered with perfunctory Sturm und Drang . Fortunately, the violins exorcised a slightly strident tone in this warm-up. It would have made the Sibelius a long, pained journey.