MUSIC REVIEW : A Vigorous Strauss Fills Concert Hall

The maxim “less is more” never applied to composer Richard Strauss. For Wagner’s crafty successor, “more” was seldom enough. It was just the beginning. Music director Yoav Talmi and the San Diego Symphony successfully exploited Strauss’ grandiose aesthetic Thursday night at Copley Symphony Hall with a stylish, full-blooded interpretation of Strauss’ oft-quoted tone poem “Also Sprach Zarathustra.”

Conducting from memory, Talmi led his appropriately augmented forces with confidence and genial sweep. He appeared to take the score’s bombast and professed allusions to Nietzschean philosophy with a sizable grain of salt, allowing the vast sonic tableaux to unfold easily, with warmth and intensity. The orchestra’s charged response and well-balanced, vital ensemble kept the tone poem’s momentum alive during its meandering patches of pseudo-Wagnerian rumblings from the low strings and winds.

Violinist Ilya Kaler came to Talmi’s rescue in the Prokofiev Second Violin Concerto in G Minor. Although Korean violinist Young Uck Kim had been scheduled to play the demanding concerto, he withdrew last month just before the season opened. Eager to keep the Prokofiev on the docket, Talmi found Kaler, a 28-year-old Soviet musician now serving on Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory Faculty, and engaged him only a week before the concert.

Kaler’s sympathy for the concerto’s rhapsodic lines was unmistakable. He dispatched its nimble figuration with aplomb, and his well-focused timbre revealed a sweetness too infrequently encountered in today’s crop of powerhouse violin virtuosi. He illuminated the concerto’s architecture without unleashing its smoldering passion. A few hints of the composer’s signature sarcasm, for example, would have made a more compelling performance, and projecting the fervor of, say, his contemporary compatriot Viktoria Mullova would have made it memorable.

Talmi opened the program with a plush, unhurried view of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G Minor. The large forces--only a few strings trimmed from the orchestra’s customary full component--and relaxed tempos gave the familiar symphony a stately demeanor, with a touch of Schubertian lyricism in the finale. It wasn’t heaven-storming Mozart, but a traditional approach that portrays the composer as a harbinger of even greater orchestral glory to come.