MUSIC REVIEW : Robert Shaw Leads Salute to Genius of Leonard Bernstein

It is still too early to know what place Leonard Bernstein will hold in the pantheon of American composers. Now that the vibrant, ever-controversial persona is gone, only his music can properly argue his cause. Friday night at Copley Symphony Hall, Robert Shaw conducted the San Diego Symphony in an all-Bernstein program that made an eloquent case for the composer’s intellectual breadth and musical vision.

Before the concert started, Shaw, who is the symphony’s principal guest conductor, offered some words from the podium that favorably compared Bernstein’s achievements with those of Giuseppe Verdi. Shaw’s conducting of four disparate Bernstein works, however, made a more convincing argument than Shaw’s strained comparison.

Shaw opened the concert with Bernstein the Broadway sophisticate. The Symphonic Dances from “West Side Story” bounced with raucous enthusiasm from the percussion and brass departments, but much of the orchestra’s playing remained on the all-too-familiar glossy surface.

Bernstein the philosopher was represented by “The Age of Anxiety,” the composer’s rarely played Second Symphony. Exhibiting all the ominous foreboding of a vintage film noir, this opus proved to be the program’s most moving offering. With the able keyboard assistance of Jeffrey Kahane, Shaw and the orchestra gave a probing, incisive account of the prolix symphony. True, the fussy, rhapsodic score could be described as a structural nightmare. But it holds many moments of high drama and contrasting introspection.

Kahane has regularly demonstrated his athletic, well-disciplined technique at La Jolla SummerFests. With fierce octaves and immaculate attacks, the young American pianist navigated Bernstein’s neoclassical obstacle course with enviable aplomb and dispensed the jazzy apostrophe with good-humored ease.

The concert concluded with Bernstein the liturgist. Two pensive meditations from “Mass” seemed to recapitulate the angst-ridden emotional states of the Second Symphony. But the “Chichester Psalms,” sung by the La Jolla Civic University Chorus and boy soprano Christopher Johnson, rounded out the picture of Bernstein the hopeful mystic.

Shaw’s authoritative direction of the “Psalms” brought brilliant focus from the orchestra and a welcome unanimity from the chorus. Its light, airy sonority could hardly have been more congruent with the final movement’s pastel sweet harmonies and seraphic melodies. Although the chorus lacked the gravity to command the opening movement’s stalwart declamation, the treacherous middle-movement fugue was executed with deft precision.

Johnson intoned his solo with clear, sweet tones, but without any sense of melodic accent. Like a well-trained chorister, he had memorized his part and sang out confidently.