MUSIC REVIEW : A New, Improved Masur, Gewandhaus

When the storied Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig made its local debut four years ago, its hometown was in a different nation, its music director of 17 years little known here. The venerable band--the orchestra of Mendelssohn and the weightiest names of German Romanticism--also dismayed many knowledgeable listeners with its provincial level of execution.

Walls have come down since then, and curtains gone up. There is one Germany now, and Kurt Masur is about to take over the New York Philharmonic.

The orchestra seems to have changed, also--or practiced. On its return to Ambassador Auditorium Saturday, the Gewandhaus group gave a clean and cleansing account of a Brahms program, which suggested that the unhappy performances of 1987 may have been tour aberrations rather than the real thing.

The woodwinds are still a generally quavery lot, pallid at best. That may be one reason why Masur allows the strings to engulf everything in their power. In the fresh Ambassador acoustic, the string choir exerted a lively presence of precise and impassioned, firmly rooted playing.

Masur unleashed his strings on the Second Symphony of Brahms, another of the famous composers who conducted the Gewandhaus Orchestra. Working from memory and without a baton, Masur directed a spirited version, reflective in nuance rather than longueurs.

There was little of the ostentatiously bucolic about this performance, filled though it was with nimble dance and pointed, genial song. Appallingly untimely electronic beeps sabotaged the final cadence of the first movement, but Masur did not let the distraction interfere with a purposeful, illuminating long-range architectural and expressive plan, or his ennobling sense of line in the Adagio.

His strings gave him everything in the way of limber-yet-mellow sound and rhythmic vigor. The color of the piece was perforce limited, but preferable to the individualistic hooting that often emerged with the woodwinds, as at the beginning of the Allegretto.

The solo vehicle in this case proved another display for the prowess of the strings, with concertmaster Christian Funke and principal cellist Jurnjakob Timm taking the duties in the Double Concerto. They were well matched and virtually a paradigm for the collective work of their choir--sweet, slender tone suavely deployed.

Both stressed almost Bachian rigor in their opening statements, blossoming into pertinent lyric fervor. Masur provided a fully collaborative accompaniment that reveled in its own assertive turn, yet deferred equably in matters of balance and articulation.

It took some coaxing from the mostly standing house, but Masur and the Gewandhaus finally reconfirmed the good impression of the strings with a volatile, surging account of the Hungarian Dance No. 1.

Masur and the Gewandhaus Orchestra appear Tuesday and Wednesday evenings in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion . The Tuesday program is a Prokofiev, Henze and Strauss program with cellist Timm; the Wednesday program features pianist Elisabeth Leonskaya and a Glinka, Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn program.