Philadelphia Delivers Power Without Grace

The Philadelphia Orchestra, under its longtime music director Eugene Ormandy, used to be the smoothest of ensembles--not always stylistically acute, perhaps, but oh so elegant. Listening to it was like riding in a Rolls-Royce.

In 1980, Riccardo Muti came along and refashioned the group in his own virile image; it became more muscular and sportier, an orchestral Ferrari.

Sunday afternoon at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa, under its present music director, 74-year-old Wolfgang Sawallisch, the Philadelphia Orchestra sounded like nothing so much as a sport utility vehicle, riding roughshod over everything in its path.

You had to be impressed with the power, with the way the orchestra mowed down any and all technical obstacles. You had to be impressed with the string section--strong, deep-voiced, militarily precise--and with the brass, which blazed away.

But it wasn’t a very sensitive or graceful ride. Musical curves were lumbered through, and there was very little soft playing, not one ravishing pianissimo. Nor were the performances interpretively distinctive or personal. And that, in ultra-familiar works by Tchaikovsky and Hindemith, and a rarity by Weber, was a real shame.

Why play Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony if you have nothing special to say about it? Sawallisch’s reading was all boilerplate. There wasn’t an original idea nor an especially human slant. What’s more, the conductor controlled instrumental balances so carelessly that the details of Tchaikovsky’s brilliant orchestration took a walk. Solos lacked the expressive touch; the famous horn opening of the second movement, for instance, went by la-di-da.

Sawallisch didn’t even manage to balance the trumpet atop the climactic surges. Loud passages became a din, coarse and undifferentiated, with monolithic marching band contributions from brass and percussion. This was heavy-handed Tchaikovsky, devoid of the balletic finesse and pointed lyricism that are his hallmarks.

Sawallisch, who conducted from memory all afternoon, presided over Hindemith’s “Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber” as if it were an etude. He did little to clarify its intricate counterpoint and heavily ornamented textures, except for when he would wave off a particular section of players he thought was playing too loud--an irritating habit that only pointed up the problems.

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Sawallisch, now in his fifth season as the orchestra’s conductor, did have an individual take on Weber’s Haydnesque First Symphony, but unfortunately it was woefully antediluvian. Counterpoising the full complement of Philadelphia strings, a veritable army, against the classically tiny woodwind section, he lost sight of proportions. The composer’s gentle string breezes became full-blown gales, and the interplay between the sections was ridiculous in the contrasts, a Godzilla versus Bambi scenario.