MUSIC REVIEW : S.D. Symphony Ends Season With Blazing Sound More Melodramatic Than Glorious

From a glance at Friday’s program, it was obvious that the San Diego Symphony intended to end its subscription season in a blaze of glory. They invited no less a pianist than Misha Dichter to play the Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto and chose the Mussorgsky-Ravel “Pictures at an Exhibition” for a fireworks finale.

This intended blaze of glory, however, came closer to a contest to break high decibel records for Symphony Hall. Guest conductor Theo Alcantara, music director of the Phoenix Symphony, appeared to be in a state of constant agitation, and his visceral readings consistently played to the gallery. From the brass he could not get enough volume, even when they only succeeded in blasting their already shaky intonation out of the hall.

Rarely did Alcantara ask anyone to play more softly or, one might add, more thoughtfully. While the Spanish-born maestro has gained a reputation for his work in the opera pit, he carried a penchant for unrelieved operatic melodrama to the orchestra podium. His flamboyant approach to “Pictures at an Exhibition” exposed the weaknesses in the orchestra’s ensemble, their imprecise attacks, and the need for more string players to balance the winds and brasses.

The case of Dichter and Beethoven is more complicated. With his formidable technique, his equanimity in the face of strenuous passage work, and his ability to fuse cascades of tiny black notes into seamless, shimmering arcs, it seemed at times that Dichter was playing on auto pilot. Fortunately, he broke out of those musical trances with an occasional elegant gesture, welcome parenthetic contrasts that revealed a sense of imagination behind all of that technique. If he had strong convictions about the work’s dramatic quality, he kept them masked.

He commenced the concerto’s slow movement with a hint of soulful reflection, only to be battered by overblown orchestral antiphony spurred on by the conductor, who had allowed the orchestra to overpower him more than once in the opening movement. Alcantara’s vision of the concerto hovered between heroic and grandiloquent. With Dichter’s subtle rhythmic inflections of the final movement rondo theme, he introduced a touch of elegance.

To an appreciative and already cheering audience, Dichter tossed a virtuoso encore, Liszt’s rendering of the “Rakoczy March.” Was this to vent the passion he stifled in the Beethoven, or just to impress the crowd with his stupendous octave technique?

Wagner’s infrequently played Overture to “Rienzi” opened the program. Alcantara’s hyping of this mindless bit of juvenilia presaged his unbridled attack on the Mussorgsky.