MUSIC REVIEW : Symphony Season Ends on a Threatening Note

In spite of its achievements musical and financial over the past year, the San Diego Symphony ended its season on that sadly familiar note of impending doom.

Although Friday night’s performance under guest conductor Hans Graf did nothing to contribute to this unsettling specter, the threat of losing its $500,000 subsidy from the city’s transient occupancy tax next year brought executive director Wesley Brustad to the stage after intermission.

Brustad told the Copely Symphony Hall audience that San Diego City Manager John Lockwood’s proposed budget, which would divert $4.9 million in transient occupancy tax revenues from a long list of local arts organizations, would cost the orchestra the equivalent of the entire first violin section.

“The proposed city budget knocks the legs out from all that we’ve accomplished over the last three years,” said Brustad, who urged symphony patrons to lobby City Council members to support funding for local arts groups.

Some of the orchestra’s notable accomplishments were displayed in the program-opening Mozart Symphony No. 28, which Graf conducted with warm-hearted refinement.

Without the orchestra’s discipline and tight sense of ensemble from within the string sections, Mozart’s effervescent rococo work would have been a precarious exercise, especially at Graf’s athletic tempos.

It was particularly rewarding to hear the players respond so effortlessly to the stylish requests of the guest maestro, who is the Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra’s principal conductor.

Richard Strauss’ “Don Quixote,” that odd fusion of tone poem and cello concerto, brought the full orchestra back for the program’s second half.

If the orchestra sounded rather anemic when it essayed “Don Quixote” last fall under guest conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, the players have clearly acquired a depth and warmly integrated sound over the past eight months.

Graf ably presided over the rambling score, which seems lofty to Strauss aficionados and convoluted to the unbelieving.

Lynn Harrell handled the solo cello part with his customary aplomb and sensitivity. His delicate passages were nothing short of luminous, although a richer timbre would have better suited the composer’s more expansive themes.

Symphony principal violist Yun-Jie Liu dispatched his solo duties with deft phrasing and an assertive, reedy tone redolent of Strauss’ ripe Romanticism.

Harrell, who completes his term as the orchestra’s music adviser this season, included two shorter Tchaikovsky baubles as a bonus to the local audience, which has always shown Harrell effusive approval.

“Pezzo Capriccio,” a test of virtuoso cello technique, proved to be the right vehicle for Harrell’s facile approach to his instrument, but the melancholy “Andante Cantabile”--arranged from the composer’s First String Quartet--seemed shallow and out of place on a serious orchestra concert.