MUSIC REVIEW : A Warm, Restrained Schubert Under Shaw’s Baton

When Robert Shaw ascends the podium, he communicates a certaingrandeur that is difficult to ignore. Gravity and authority precede him. Perhaps his reputation and his august figure conspire to evoke such audience anticipation.

Thursday night at Copley Symphony Hall, the San Diego Symphony principal guest conductor guided the orchestra through his lofty but overly restrained view of Schubert’s Ninth Symphony (“The Great”). Shaw’s vision is clearly that of the connoisseur: a mature, reflective consideration of a work that sprang from the composer’s youth.

The benefits of Shaw’s paradoxical approach included the lyrical feast of the slow second movement and the stately, uncluttered textures of the broad opening movement. But the conductor’s carefully plotted understatement robbed the scherzo of its urgency and the finale of its triumphal culmination.

Although Shaw’s left hand continually held the orchestra back, the players gave him all the warm sonorities and delectable phrasing he required. This was Schubert to warm the heart, not to send the passions surging.

First prize for understatement, however, went not to Shaw, but to principal clarinet David Peck for his chilly solo in the Mozart Clarinet Concerto, K. 622.

Ironically, Shaw launched the familiar concerto with a witty, infectious lilt, only to be restrained by Peck’s austere declamation.

Shaw quickly tailored his own effervescent notion of the Mozart piece to give Peck the deft sotto voce accompaniment he needed. Like the Schubert second movement, the slow movement of the Mozart concerto bloomed with a delicate serenity, but the freewheeling rondo was reduced to a circumspect exercise.

Peck, the symphony’s principal clarinet, gave a more polished account of the concerto than he did three years ago under guest conductor Andrew Litton, but his emotional distance made his technical eloquence a Pyrrhic victory.

Shaw opened his concert with John Harbison’s genial orchestral appetizer “Remembering Gatsby,” which was written for Shaw’s Atlanta Symphony in 1985. A mock-serious overture that keeps slipping into a 1920s fox-trot, Harbison’s seven-minute exercise for full orchestra falls somewhere between pastiche and nostalgic evocation. If accessibility were the composer’s goal, he succeeded with a vengeance.

The audience applauded warmly, and at intermission, a woman gushed to her companion, “I thought the first piece was adorable ,” as if “Remembering Gatsby” were a toy poodle on a leash. File it under summer pops encores.

This program will be repeated at 8 o’clock tonight in Copley Symphony Hall.