Gustav Meier Brings the Unexpected to Long Beach

The Long Beach Symphony podium was occupied Saturday night by Gustav Meier, the veteran Swiss-born conductor who is perhaps best known as a distinguished conducting teacher at Tanglewood until 1996. His discography draws a blank in today’s not-always-reliable Schwann catalog, although one remembers an interesting LP of his from the 1960s containing the first recording of Villa-Lobos’ Cello Concerto No. 2.

Certainly Meier’s enterprising spirit came to the fore at the Terrace Theatre as he presented two 20th century American works in a program that stood the usual order of things on its head. Rather than close the program after intermission with the usual symphony, he placed Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2 on its own before the break. It was a performance that you don’t encounter too often anymore--a slowish, heavy-textured, central European, big-orchestra Beethoven Second, appropriately roughhewn if not exactly flying off the pages.

The main interest of the concert was a most ingratiating cello concerto by the West Virginia-born composer Katherine Hoover called “Stitch-te Naku”--a spider-grandmother of Native American lore who weaves all kinds of things into existence. Hoover introduces her soloist ingeniously, setting a wild pastoral scene and having the cello quietly play weird microtonal glides as part of the landscape until the full-blooded solo line bursts into view. Woodwind birds chatter with the cello, rhino-like brasses wail, and an insistent Indian dance dominates the last portion. The 18 1/2-minute piece works as a unified fresco of creation--with reminders of Ravel’s “Daphnis and Chloe” now and then--and cellist Sharon Robinson handled it with real flair and a warmly reverberant tone, adding a ripely emotional peformance of Faure’s Elegie as an encore.

As a bang-up finale, Meier chose Barber’s “Medea’s Meditation and Dance of Vengeance,” an eloquent, ultimately furious piece of mid-century mainstream (but not arch-conservative) writing, where Meier heightened the wry comments of the violins and built to a controlled final cataclysm.