MUSIC REVIEW : Levine and the Met Opera Orchestra Meet Strauss

James Levine, who brought his Metropolitan Opera Orchestra to Segerstrom Hall Wednesday night, isn’t much like the other stellar conductors of his generation. He happens to be a thinker, and a bona fide romantic thinker at that.

He favors broad gestures, generous emotional indulgences and spacious, luxurious tempos. He savors heroic climaxes, and takes his time getting to them. Although he is a superb technician and a sensitive colorist, his work is never merely showy at one extreme or merely fussy at the other. He conducts the musicians, not the audience.

Over the decades--two and a half, to be nearly exact--he has concentrated on opera. We haven’t seen much of him in the concert hall. Our loss.

Within the confines of the shadowy pit, he has worked wonders. He has defined himself as a musician unusually sensitive to dramatic values and, at the same time, as a collaborator uncommonly sympathetic to the frailties of the human voice.

When he first came to the Met, he inherited a rather tired, overworked, undisciplined band. It certainly could rise to lofty heights on lofty occasions, but, unchallenged and uninspired, it reverted to drab routine most of the time. Slowly and methodically, Levine turned that band into one of the world’s finest orchestras.

Under his affectionate, no-nonsense leadership, the instrumental ensemble has found its own voice. It is a big voice, lush in timbre, exquisitely balanced in its components, capable of extraordinary power counterbalanced--under the right conditions--by extraordinary finesse.

Unfortunately, the conditions weren’t invariably right on Wednesday. During the first half of his introductory program, a program devoted exclusively to Richard Strauss, Levine seemed to misjudge the hyper-reverberant acoustic of the Performing Arts Center. Everything emerged loud. Much too loud.

Under the circumstances, “Death and Transfiguration” sounded needlessly tough, and sometimes surprisingly rough. And the dynamic miscalculation proved even more damaging in the exquisite introspection of the Four Last Songs.

The threat of aesthetic disorientation may have emanated from the players, but it was sadly reinforced by the folks out front. Surprisingly small and embarrassingly insensitive, the benefit crowd blithely destroyed the elegiac mood with instant applause after each Lied. It was as if Strauss’ gentle valedictories represented an inconsequential parade of vulgar arias. The clap-happy audience didn’t seem to notice that neither soloist nor conductor acknowledged the misplaced ovations.

Inexplicably, the management encouraged the alienation, to a degree, by failing to provide texts or translations of the poignant Hesse and Eichendorff poems. Apparently, allowing the listeners to follow the narrative imagery was a matter of no official importance.

One appreciated Levine’s decision to pair “Death and Transfiguration” with the Last Songs. The programming choice underscored that magical moment at the end of “Im Abendrot” when the soprano contemplates the onset of death and the horn responds with the transfiguration theme Strauss had written 59 years earlier.

The connection would have exerted greater pathos, however, if Levine had etched the ethereal sentiment in shimmering pianissimo tones. It might have helped, too, if Margaret Price, the stellar soloist, had articulated the words clearly, or if she had liberated her attention (and ours) from the score she clutched in her hands.

The Welsh soprano--who sounded radiant one moment, dull and flat the next--seemed oddly uninvolved. Anyone who recalls the late Lucia Popp’s heartbreaking performance with Carlo Maria Giulini and the Los Angeles Philharmonic could not have been happy.

Matters improved drastically, thank goodness, after intermission when Levine turned to “Don Quixote.” The drama was perfectly focused here, and the playing was brilliant.

Jerry Grossman, one of the Met’s two principal cellists, brought extraordinary flair and poise to the titular solos yet never exaggerated the rhetoric. Violist Michael Ouzounian seconded him deftly in the incidental utterances of Sancho Panza. On the podium, the calmly virtuosic Levine juggled grandiose passion, expressive warmth, jaunty wit and suave elegance. It was terrific.

At encore time, everyone expected the “Rosenkavalier” waltzes. But the maestro opted for the intermezzo from Puccini’s “Manon Lescaut” and Brahms’ first Hungarian Dance. Apparently, he wasn’t in the mood for waltzing.