MUSIC REVIEW : Guest Conductor in His Element for the Moody Shostakovich Sixth

In his auspicious debut with the San Diego Symphony, Polish conductor Kazimierz Kord brought Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony to Copley Symphony Hall on Thursday night. Although the work was programmed a year ago, the ominous, moody symphony was tailor-made for today’s political crises. Shostakovich completed the work in 1939, when Europe was gearing up for World War II, and, although the symphony is not programmatic, it is easy to infer cataclysmic forebodings from the somber opening movement.

A conductor of extravagant gestures and unrestrained emoting, Kord, who is music director of the Warsaw Philharmonic, was in his element in the Sixth Symphony.

For the opening movement he chose a broad tempo and assiduously delineated its long-winded themes, especially those plangent motives that emerged from the bowels of the orchestra.

The players responded athletically, emphasizing brilliance rather than blend, although they did not neglect the introspective nature of the movement’s more solemn moments.

In the Sixth Symphony, Shostakovich provided solo riffs for nearly every neglected instrument, from piccolo to bass trombone, and San Diego’s first chair players handled these tasks with aplomb.

Kord coaxed an unusually massive sound from the orchestra, especially in the work’s extroverted final movements. In the finale, he let out all the stops with a hellbent tempo that guaranteed a wild response from the audience.

Kord’s labored account of Mozart’s familiar Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola, K. 320d, proved less rewarding. Muddy textures and a heavy-handed pulse kept his Mozart interpretation decidedly earthbound.

In the solo violin role, concertmaster Igor Gruppman gave one of his most fluent, stylistically congruent performances. The aggressive vitality of Gruppman’s figuration and his clean-edged, pliant timbre, however, did not mesh with solo violist Atar Arad’s more subdued approach and mellow sound. Each approach is valid, but together they were mismatched.

Polish composer Karol Szymanowski wrote a fair number of orchestral works, but Kord chose an orchestral transcription of Szymanowski’s “Nocturne,” originally for violin and piano.

Like Szymanowski’s impressionistic First Violin Concerto, the “Nocturne” is a highly evocative essay for large orchestra, dabbled with Orientalism and exotic percussion touches. The attenuated work made a rather enigmatic program opener, however.

For the Mozart Prelude Concert, played just before the main concert, symphony bassoonist Dennis Michel and clarinetists David Peck and Charles Ellis-MacLeod gave an unusually refined account of Mozart’s Divertimento, K. 439b. With unmitigated unanimity and elegantly detailed phrasing, the three musicians buffed this occasional work into a real gem.

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