MUSIC REVIEW : Symphony Ends on a Happy Note

In his recent film “The Player,” Robert Altman crafted a sneering sendup of Hollywood’s infatuation with happy endings. Either San Diego Symphony music director Yoav Talmi didn’t see Altman’s satire or he casts a less jaundiced eye at happy endings, because his buoyant reading of Brahms’ Second Symphony closed the local orchestra’s 1991-92 season with a big smiling happy face.

Alternately athletic and lyrical, the orchestra proved unusually responsive, giving Talmi the warm, generous, smoothly integrated sound he has patiently cultivated over his two-year tenure as music director. From the playfully elegant banter of the woodwinds in the middle movements to the finale’s triumphant, full-throated brassy flourish, this was the kind of polished playing to convert unbelievers.

No doubt part of this success formula was selecting a work that paralleled Talmi’s own personal strengths. Irony and tragedy may not be his strong suit, but the expansive optimism of Brahms’ Second Symphony could be an apt credo for San Diego’s earnest yet confident music director.

Unfortunately, Friday night’s program-opening Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber showed precisely where the San Diego Symphony needs its greatest improvement. Ideally, the familiar Adagio should float from the stage and vanish mysteriously like an apparition. With the San Diego strings sounding forced and unyielding, this Adagio remained decidedly earthbound. Despite the overall sonic improvement Talmi has elicited from the orchestra, the strings still lack confidence and cohesion.

Pianist Kevin Kenner’s highly idiosyncratic interpretation of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto was introspective to a fault.

His approach kept him hovering above the concerto with delicate attacks and understated though precise articulation. It was as if he were about to make some grand statement but lost his nerve and didn’t.

Kenner turned the quiet middle movement into a dreamy nocturne--not an untenable possibility--but his unrelieved restraint robbed the brilliant rondo finale of its robust elegance and structural clarity. Talmi appeared to have a more traditional, extroverted view of the concerto, which he asserted when he could, but it only served to underscore Kenner’s march to a very muffled different drummer.