Hermanto Upholds a Vibrant Conducting Tradition

Over the past 44 years, the Debut Orchestra of the Young Musicians Foundation has nurtured a host of stellar orchestral musicians. Its conductor alumni include Michael Tilson Thomas, Lawrence Foster, Myung-Whun Chung and Jung-Ho Pak. Heir to their auspicious mantle is Wilson Hermanto, who inaugurated his tenure with an imaginative calling card Saturday evening at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre.

Born in Indonesia, Hermanto has studied violin at the Peabody Conservatory and conducting at the Manhattan School of Music. Teachers and mentors the young conductor acknowledges include Carlo Maria Giulini, Kurt Masur, Colin Davis, Jorma Panula and Sixten Erhling.

He certainly seemed confident and comfortable on the podium, jacketless and dressed in black. He has a clean and elegant stick technique, a tendency to point dramatically with his left hand, and a consistently encouraging smile for his musicians.

More important, he has ideas about music. The symphonies of Carl Nielsen are not quite the arcana Hermanto suggested in amiable, artless remarks from the stage, but the Danish composer’s First Symphony is indeed a concert rarity. Hermanto revealed familiarity and sympathy with the vibrant, youthful work, exposing a Brahmsian subsurface of polyphonic tensions while maintaining the big, bright gestures above it in vigorous glory.

Most revealing, perhaps, was the alert care with which Hermanto negotiated Nielsen’s pronounced shifts of mood and manner. He found expressive patterns beneath the overt emotions and brought a sense of balanced process to the fore.

Nielsen’s often virtuosic demands taxed the Debut Orchestra resources sorely. Smudged intonation and individual perils aside, however, this was a lithe and eager performance. In its zesty spirit and quick responses, the orchestra was well-matched to the music, and Hermanto emphasized his band’s many virtues.

The orchestra also produced the evening’s soloist from its ranks, flutist Lance Suzuki, an undergraduate studying at USC. He played Ibert’s 1934 Concerto with articulate verve, blowing through the long perpetual motion lines of the outer movements with an almost proto-bop swing. At the singing center of the piece, he proved musically poised, cool in sound and eminently Gallic in affect, with a sweetly lyrical duet assist from concertmaster Wilson Chu.

This concerto also provides a workout for the accompanists. Hermanto focused his orchestra’s energies on rhythmic point and clear textures, providing a tightly meshed, interactive frame for Suzuki’s expressive efforts.

To open, Hermanto chose Haydn’s “London” Symphony, No. 104. He presented it on familiar postmodern classical terms: limber, well-scrubbed, buoyant and direct.