MUSIC REVIEW : Perick Triumphs Once Again With an All-German Program : Music: The West German guest conductor was authoritative and genial on the podium, taking the San Diego Symphony through its paces.

Christof Perick returned Thursday night to Symphony Hall with an unapologetically Teutonic marathon for the San Diego Symphony. Ever authoritative and genial on the podium, the West German guest conductor opened with Wagner’s Prelude and “Liebestod” from “Tristan und Isolde,” followed by a larger-than-life account of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Piano Concerto; he then completed his tour with Richard Strauss’ Suite from “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.”

Alexander Toradze’s percussive, highly mannered approach to the Beethoven Concerto made listening to the familiar work both arresting and unsettling. He alternated between a steely, muscular attack--the kind one immediately associates with Lisztian fury--and a studied, ghostly pianissimo. Without denying his immense technical craft, he appeared to labor over small effects at the expense of a larger, coherent vision of the piano’s role in the concerto.

A native of Soviet Georgia, Toradze sufficiently honed his technique in Moscow to take second prize in the 1977 Van Cliburn Competition. While his brand of Beethoven may be standard in Russian circles, it had neither the rhapsodic sweep of traditional Romantic interpretations nor the supple clarity of more historically informed contemporary performance practices. But it was not dull. Perick and the orchestra provided a supportive and appropriately large-scaled accompaniment.

Wagner has never been much of a staple for the local orchestra, so Perick’s finely detailed instructions were executed dutifully but without much sympathy for the idiom. The conductor chose a broad tempo that built

slowly, but because the players provided so little emotional tension, there was not much exultation by the work’s climax.

It was apparent that Perick relished the elaborate artifice of Strauss’ neoclassical charade, a clever pastiche of opulently orchestrated fanfares and dances. From his scaled-down ensemble of 18 strings and an equal number of wind and percussion players, Perick elicited a suave, stylish interpretation of the suite. Notable were the splashy brass licks in the third movement and concertmaster Igor Gruppman’s fluent solo flights. All in all, it was refreshing and untaxing, a kind of musical show-and-tell in powdered perukes.

This program will be repeated tonight at 8 in Symphony Hall.