MUSIC REVIEW : Harrell’s Eloquent Cello Solo Triumphs at S.D. Symphony

Cellist Lynn Harrell is no stranger to the San Diego Symphony. A frequent guest performer during David Atherton’s tenure as music director, Harrell also served two seasons as the orchestra’s official music adviser during the hiatus between Atherton and Yoav Talmi, whose term as music director began earlier this month. Harrell has even put his cello down and conducted the orchestra on a few less-than-memorable occasions.

But Thursday night at Copley Symphony Hall, Harrell was back doing what he does best--soloing in one of the monumental concertos of the cello repertory. His eloquent account of Dvorak’s B Minor Cello Concerto brought the audience to its feet in a well-deserved display of gratitude. Not one to play with his heart on his sleeve, Harrell nevertheless infused his soaring lines with an impassioned urgency completely congruent with Dvorak’s unabashed Romantic idiom.

In the middle movement, Harrell delicately coaxed bel canto phrases from the cello’s uppermost register and offered a shimmering cadenza of double stops. Throughout the work, his ample virtuosity remained at the disposal of the music, and he deftly balanced the work’s rhapsodic impulses with a knowing appreciation of its formal design.

Under guest conductor Klauspeter Seibel, the orchestra gave Harrell robust support. Seibel, who is music director of the Kiel Opera and the Nuremberg Symphony, is a bundle of energy on the podium, but he seems preoccupied with the mechanics of conducting. Subtlety is not one of his strong suits, and he proved much too eager to let out all the stops when a properly balanced forte would have sufficed. Apparently his idea of Dvorak is Richard Strauss with a Czech accent.

Seibel’s workaday approach to the Beethoven Second Symphony was also disappointing. Just two weeks ago, Talmi elicited a warm, elegant Haydn Symphony No. 96 from the orchestra, but those virtues were absent from this performance of Beethoven’s last salute to the Classical symphony.

Seibel may have been aiming for a heroic approach--that properly belongs to the Third Symphony, of course--but his pumped-up climaxes merely sounded strident and forced. The middle movements languished like a becalmed sailboat.

Seibel opened the program with a spirited reading of Weber’s Overture to “Oberon,” which turned out to be the orchestra’s most polished offering of the evening.