Staatskapelle Plays on Loose Rein

The Dresden Staatskapelle, which appeared at the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Wednesday night, has a glorious, incomparable history. The state orchestra of the German city was founded in 1548, before there was anything like a modern orchestra, to provide entertainment for the local court. One of its early directors was the great Baroque composer Heinrich Schutz.

Vivaldi wrote for the Staatskapelle. When Mozart conducted it in the 18th century, it was considered Europe’s best orchestra. Weber and Wagner were its music directors in the 19th century, and most of the famous Romantic composers wrote pieces for Dresden. In the early 20th century, Richard Strauss was so closely associated with the ensemble that it became known as Strauss’ orchestra, and it gave the first performance of nine Strauss operas.

But when Giuseppe Sinopoli was appointed music director in 1992, many of the Italian conductor’s detractors spoke and wrote in apocalyptic terms, as if that appointment signified the end of orchestra music as we have known it.

Sinopoli divides the music world. Though a trained surgeon, he has never been deft with a baton. Rather it is his mind that is interesting. He holds advanced degrees in psychoanalytic medicine and archeology. He is a modernist composer who wrote an opera about Freud’s sexually obsessed patient, Lou Salome. He has expounded in musical papers on a theory that great music is the product of neurosis, and that that is how it should be conducted.

*

The product of all this has often been performances that are frustratingly sloppy and even perverse, yet that also sound fresh and original. American and British orchestras went through a period of being intrigued by this peculiar conductor and then put off by him, as was the case with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the early 1980s. Yet he retains a substantial following in Germany and Italy. He can be a fascinating opera conductor, a favorite at Bayreuth and La Scala.

And Sinopoli has apparently thrived in Dresden with an orchestra known, at least in modern times, for its impeccable ensemble playing, for its great lucidity, warmth and flexibility. From the evidence of Wednesday’s concert, the orchestra’s sound has not changed much in the nearly 10 years that Sinopoli has led it. It seems to be Sinopoli himself who has changed.

In Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony, which opened the program, Sinopoli proved no better a technician than he ever was, but he also appeared to have given up some of his more extreme notions about music as the record of neurosis. Instead, he blankly turned on this wonderful machine and let it run.

In the opening phrase, he was careless about Beethoven’s articulations between staccato and legato. Each movement in this wittiest of Beethoven’s orchestral pieces lumbered. There was surprisingly little attention to details, always a controversial hallmark of Sinopoli. In his livelier days, he could occasionally get carried away by a rhythm and even take an amusingly awkward hop or two on the podium; here he was expressionless and glued to the floor. The orchestra had a beautiful sound but was not crisp in its attacks.

But maybe Beethoven is just not his composer. Sinopoli has always thrived on the later Romantics and especially the early 20th century neurotics. The piece after intermission was Strauss’ epic tone poem, “Ein Heldenleben,” a hero’s life in which the composer is the hero, making rapturous love to his wife and doing ferocious battle with his nasty critics. Again, this was a performance surprising for Sinopoli’s lack of self-indulgence. He might like to linger fondly in the love music and make a splash in the battle scenes, but there was nothing resembling his earlier flamboyance.

Instead, what Sinopoli did was allow the orchestra to be its remarkable self. Strauss is in the players’ collective blood, and the greatest pleasure of the performance was the sheer naturalness of expression on every level. Here Sinopoli did attend to details, and here too he was secure in the large sweep of the score. As for psychological wackiness, Strauss supplies enough that his score needs no help, just consummate music making. And every section of the orchestra, lucid and precise, brought pleasure. The concertmaster, Kai Vogler, contributed loving grace and a beautiful tone to the extensive violin solos.

The encore was Weber’s overture to his opera “Oberon,” and it was announced by Sinopoli in what sounded like a newly acquired German accent.