MUSIC REVIEW - Mellow Strauss, Fussy Beethoven

Kurt Sanderling opened his Los Angeles Philharmonic concert on Thursday with the overture to “Don Giovanni.” It hadn’t been heard at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion since the preceding Friday, when Mozart’s masterpiece had its last stand with the Music Center Opera.

Sanderling ended his program with “Ein Heldenleben.” It hadn’t been heard hereabouts since Tuesday, when Christoph von Dohnanyi led the Cleveland Orchestra through Richard Strauss’ tone poem in Orange County (with repetitions scheduled for Palm Desert on Thursday and San Diego on Friday).

The repertory duplications may not reflect careful advance planning, but they do offer the observer some interesting parallels. One person’s redundancy, after all, can be another’s revelation. Comparisons need not be odorous.

Admittedly, one would be hard pressed to define a revelation in Sanderling’s “Don Giovanni” without knowing his thoughts on the entire dramma giocoso. There is little that one can label jocular in the overture, and the German conductor focused--with grandiose solemnity--on Mozart’s dark colors and portentous accents. The focus made good sense.

It would be nice, incidentally, if someone could persuade the old master to conduct an opera in Los Angeles. Soon.

“Ein Heldenleben” represents a more telling challenge. In this sprawling romantic showpiece, Strauss provided his performers with a broad canvas and numerous interpretive options. Dohnanyi decided that the highly emotive writing needed little reinforcement, so, with elegant restraint, he concentrated on brisk exposition and technical brilliance. Approaching the opposite expressive extreme, Sanderling exulted in unbridled heroic sentiment.

He started slow, and tended to slow down further when the great climaxes beckoned. He placed big quotation marks around the recycled motives, lest anyone miss their narrative significance. He made the loud outbursts very loud indeed, and he savored contrasting whispers for the calms that separate the storms.

In doing all this, he followed an indulgent tradition that probably can be traced to the likes of Bruno Walter, Wilhelm Furtwangler and Clemens Krauss. Dohnanyi’s cooler, more objective attitude honors an equally valid tradition that may have found its chief exponents in such paragons as Arturo Toscanini, Fritz Reiner and George Szell.

The Philharmonic played with much gusto for Sanderling, if not with the degrees of precision and flamboyance that made the Cleveland performance so remarkable. Sidney Weiss, the Philharmonic concertmaster, brought admirable finesse to the violin solos, whereas Daniel Majeske, Cleveland’s splendid concertmaster, had traced the convoluted lines with appropriate majesty and fervor on behalf of Dohnanyi.

For the centerpiece of Sanderling’s program, Mitsuko Uchido--celebrated star of concert stage, television documentaries and Mozart marathons--made her Philharmonic debut performing Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto.

How did she perform it? That depends on one’s perspectives and priorities.

Those who like a lot of sighing and roaring and fretting in their music-making found Uchida’s Beethoven profoundly moving. They gave her a standing ovation.

Those who tend to be annoyed by all that sighing and roaring and fretting found her Beethoven fussy and overwrought. Only a thin line separates sensitivity from mannerism, and a few iconoclasts in the audience--this one included--felt that Uchida zigzagged across that line about 20 times too often.

She is enormously talented, undeniably facile, sympathetically theatrical. But . . . .