MUSIC REVIEW : Sanderling Returns to Philharmonic Podium

Mozart/Mahler pairings have become, however improbably, a cliche of symphonic programming. Kurt Sanderling’s choices--as offered Thursday evening at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion with the Los Angeles Philharmonic--showed greater imagination, but no more collective identity, than most.

Mahler is almost always the chief beneficiary of these associations. The account of “Das Lied von der Erde” that Sanderling produced, which puts a real strain on the available supply of superlatives, was surely worth the prefatory indignities to Mozart’s “Little” G-minor Symphony, K. 183.

Sanderling proved alive to all the inherent Mahlerian contradictions, creating a soaring, plummeting, spacious, agoraphobic, epic miniature that was consistently true in both sound and sentiment, pristine in detail and grandly compelling in comprehensive sweep.

Dutch mezzo Jard van Nes, making her Philharmonic debut, brought pure, secure vocalism and the requisite communicative point to her wide-ranging tasks. She sang with effective, affecting clarity in both lonely chill and passionate radiance.

William Johns, a replacement for Timothy Jenkins, supplied the tenor heroics with a ringing top and broad vibrato. Hortatory ardor was his strong suit in a performance missing some of the cynical bite.

The orchestra responded to Sanderling’s ministrations with vitality and conviction. Ensemble was tight and balanced, whether in massed outpourings or solo intimacies, the sound rich and endlessly resourceful.

Sanderling seemed to view Mozart’s symphony as a darkling mystery, with many emotional points of contact with Mahler. The interpretation he put on it, however, made it sound like Brahms Lite.

The conductor reduced the string forces suitably--and he reversed the seating of the cello and viola sections between works, without obvious effect--but made scant stylistic concession otherwise. His phrasing was round and rhetorical, the sound plummy. He produced a reasonable correspondence to Mahler’s exalted fervor in the Andante, but for the most part left Mozart’s youthful work with cool ambivalence.