MUSIC REVIEW : Brothers Have Their Act Together on Brahms

Symphony Hall no longer sported the bright red banners of the Soviet arts festival, and the souvenir vendors had vacated the lobby. Indeed, at Thursday night’s San Diego Symphony performance, there was not a single lingering trace of the recent three-week festival. Too bad. Those concerts were some of the symphony’s finest hours, both in programming and level of performance, since the merrier days of the David Atherton era.

Not all of the symphony’s scheduled festival conductors showed up, but each of the three visiting maestros brought a wealth of experience and technique to the podium. Thursday’s guest conductor, Lynn Harrell, always brings experience and fine technique as a solo cellist. But, as a conductor, he is still a novice. In his third conducting stint here, it was clear that Harrell is using the local orchestra as a conducting laboratory. Unfortunately, conducting is not a quick study.

This concert’s saving grace was the opportunity to hear the brothers Benny Kim and Eric Kim in the hoary Brahms Double Concerto. Eric Kim (he was the symphony’s principal cellist last season until he won a similar post with the Cincinnati Symphony) played with passion and a keen sense of direction, drawing a full, reedy timbre from his instrument. If violinist Benny Kim did not project as full a sound, he was no less fluent, and his highest tones were unusually sweet and well-focused. As a duo, the siblings displayed precise ensemble and unanimity in their ardent interpretation of Brahms’ final orchestral work.

Harrell and the orchestra rose to most of the symphonic demands of Brahms’ score, although refinement remained an unexplored virtue in this concerto. It took the Mendelssohn Third Symphony (“Scotch”) to reveal just how rowdy and blustery the orchestra could become. Under Harrell’s generalized and awkward conducting, transitions tended to be chancy and balance almost nonexistent. This Mendelssohn was as stylistically congruent as bib overalls at a black-tie formal.

Thursday’s program endured a false start when Harrell came out on the empty stage to perform a cello transcription (with understated piano accompaniment by Cynthia Darby) of Schubert’s song, “An die Musik.” After this odd and slightly belabored introductory exercise, a handful of string players commenced in earnest with a crisp, well-balanced reading of Corelli’s F Major Concerto Grosso, Op. 6, No. 2. The 17 symphony players copied the exact instrumentation of last week’s visiting Soloists of Leningrad, although, unlike their Soviet colleagues, the local strings performed sitting down. Harrell’s blithe direction of this Baroque bonbon seemed redundant.