Strauss, Seattle style

Once stationed at Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz is piling on the years with the Seattle Symphony as the longest-serving music director (since 1985) of any major U.S. orchestra.

He has put the ensemble in the national spotlight much the way he did LACO -- via recordings, lots of them, often swimming against the current by championing American composers who were out of fashion and needed advocacy.

As part of a brief Southern California tour last week, Schwarz and his ensemble dropped in at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Saturday. As coincidence would have it, in scheduling a mainstream violin concerto before intermission and Richard Strauss afterward, they were mimicking a similar menu that the Philharmonic was presenting across town.

Yet Schwarz does offer a distinct point of view in Strauss. He likes to move things along swiftly while maintaining a voluptuous core. Schwarz jumped headlong into “Don Juan,” pushing impetuously, the rip-roaring string lines evidently posing no problems for the Seattle violin section. The suite from “Der Rosenkavalier,” a Seattle Symphony spokeswoman says, was his own concoction, which maintains the general outline of the most often played version but adds several valuable inserts.

Violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg’s eccentricities with the Bruch Violin Concerto No. 1 are strictly an acquired taste, evidently acquired by many in the audience. Schwarz hung on as straight man to this display at first, only to bend a bit in the finale.

The Seattle Symphony sounded oddly thick-set and a bit coagulated, failing to shine a transparent light through Strauss’ orchestrations. The same thing applied to the three orchestral excerpts from Act 3 of Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger” at the outset.

Yet in the encore, the orchestra rolled out a smooth, plush, delicately veiled collective texture in Bright Sheng’s arrangement of Brahms’ Opus 118, No. 2, Intermezzo, which Sheng calls “Black Swan.”