L.A. Philharmonic Makes Itself at Home in Europe : Music: Wrapping up a two-week tour, conductor Kurt Sanderling is pleased--as are the critics.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic closed its two-week European tour Wednesday night in Dresden, playing Haydn’s Symphony No. 39 and Shostakovich’s monumental Symphony No. 8. Conductor Kurt Sanderling seemed as pleased about the tour as the critics.

“For me it was great joy,” he said, “to be evening after evening so closely connected to these musicians. We have already been friends before and we will--I think--separate as even better friends.”

Playing to generally positive reviews during the six-city tour, the Philharmonic was led by the 78-year-old conductor in nine concerts in England and Germany. The tour hit Glasgow, Scotland; the cities of London and Birmingham in England, and the German cities of Cologne, Berlin and Dresden.

In Berlin, where Sanderling had started his career as a pianist and coach with the State Opera until he fled the Nazis in 1935, there wasn’t much symbolism in bringing the Los Angeles Philharmonic to his hometown.

At least no political symbolism. “The Philharmonic has played in Berlin (the last time in 1987), which I may not call the capital of Germany, since this decision has not yet been taken. But for every musician, Berlin is a capital of music.”

Sanderling was more concerned with the Shostakovich symphony, which was composed two years after Hitler’s troops invaded the Soviet Union and “too seldom played” today.

He said he really didn’t have the time, “but I decided to come to Los Angeles (during his February-March guest stint) and perform the symphony there--as a preview before our concerts in England and Germany.

“It tells us how difficult or even impossible it is to live on this Earth during this time. I found it very appropriate that we had on this tour one program (Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4) that tells how wonderful it is to live in God’s nature and a second program about the difficulty to survive in this world.”

The reviews in the Berlin press were mostly positive on the Shostakovich and critical on the Haydn.

“Unfortunately, not a Haydn interpretation of the extra class,” wrote the critic of the Berliner Morgenpost. But about the Shostakovich work, “Sanderling stimulated a performance with many merits . . . carefully studied . . . extraordinary precision and tension.”

The critic of the Tagesspiegel compared Sanderling’s interpretation with that of Maxim Shostakovich, who had performed his father’s Fifth Symphony in Berlin only six days earlier: “Sanderling’s version is in the best sense of the word moderate. He gives the music a more objective universal meaning than Maxim.”

For first trumpet Thomas Stevens, an orchestra member for 26 years, this tour saw the Philharmonic playing and sounding better than the 1987 tour.

“Of all the tours, this and the (Carlo Maria) Giulini 1980 tour were outstanding musically.”

Stevens credits Sanderling for this: “He is really a great presence and is totally in charge. He was thorough in his rehearsals, uncompromising. So in terms of preparation we were maybe in better shape than we have ever been.”