SYMPHONY REVIEW : Guest Leader Akiyama Brings Evocative Gift to San Diego Audience

Following traditional Japanese etiquette, San Diego Symphony guest conductor Kazuyoshi Akiyama brought a special gift for his hosts. In Thursday evening’s Symphony Hall concert he conducted the first local performance of Toru Takemitsu’s “Star-Isle.” The mildly astringent Impressionism of his fellow countryman’s evocative tone poem suited the orchestra’s strengths admirably, calling forth burnished sonic implosions from the brasses and warm, muted tones from the strings. This brief musical essay by Japan’s premiere composer was a welcome present indeed.

Akiyama stimulated the players in most of the right ways, leading the orchestra in one of its more energetic, persuasive programs of the current season. The 48-year-old maestro--he is music director of the Tokyo Symphony and New York’s Syracuse Symphony--presided over a vibrant, yet thoroughly detailed performance of the Samuel Barber Piano Concerto and offered an urgent, extroverted interpretation of Debussy’s “La Mer.”

The success of Barber’s concerto was ensured by piano soloist John Browning, who premiered the work about 27 years ago under the composer’s watchful eye. From his brilliant, authoritative octaves that opened the concerto, Browning sculpted a taut, muscular reading that left no doubt of his complete identity with the music. He was strong but not flashy, creating a wide spectrum of colors that made the piano sound almost orchestral. He was meticulous but not fussy, an equally apt description of Akiyama’s approach to the dense, colorful orchestral accompaniment. Seldom has the orchestra seemed so completely engaged in its half of a concerto performance.

Barber had both the good sense and the misfortune never to have been sufficiently avant-garde for the musical trendsetters of his day. But now that his music is again in vogue, and we hear it with more perspective, it is instructive to compare Barber with the current crop of born-again neo-Romantics. How many of them display even half of Barber’s compositional craft or can shape a theme as haunting as his Piano Concerto’s lavishly lyrical slow movement?

If Akiyama made every moment of “La Mer” exciting and urgent, it must be noted that Debussy’s sea is usually less turbulent under the baton of most conductors. It would be instructive to hear Akiyama conduct Bartok or early Stravinsky.

Rossini’s tediously sectional overture to “Semiramide” opened the concert, although Akiyama paced it judiciously. It seemed little more than a formality, curiously unrelated to the rest of the program. Tonight at 8 in Symphony Hall this concert will be repeated; on Sunday at 8 p.m. it will be played in Bowers Auditorium at Fallbrook’s Potter Junior High School.