MUSIC REVIEW : Tate, Philharmonic Examine Two Faces of Romanticism

Pity the poor guest conductor.

He--or, all-too-occasionally, she--pops into town for a one-week stand with an unfamiliar, probably tired, possibly blase orchestra marking time until the regular boss comes home. The first challenge is to turn two or three meager rehearsals into something more than get-acquainted sessions. Then come the concerts, and just as some sort of rapport begins to loom on the aesthetic horizon, it is time to move on.

Jeffrey Tate, the celebrated British maestro, is the latest potential casualty of this hit-and-run system. Unlike some of his predecessors in the too-long passing parade at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, he is a discerning technician and, even more welcome, an artist prone to interpretive insight. He doesn’t just wave a stick at the orchestra and pray that everyone will reach the same cadence at the same time.

For his Los Angeles Philharmonic program on Friday, he chose to contrast two extremes of romanticism: the heroic rhapsody and lofty pathos of Brahms’ Second Piano Concerto (1881) versus the overwrought churning and reheated passions of William Walton’s First Symphony (1935).

The first is a masterpiece, without question. The second raises a number of questions.

Tate encountered trouble with the wonderful Brahms yet made a many-splendored thing of the dubious Walton. The ironies never cease.

Part of the problem in the massive Germanic concerto could be attributed to the soloist, Peter Frankl, who seemed more interested in generalities than specifics. He traversed the notes decently enough, and tastefully, too. He steadfastly avoided the traps of exaggeration. Give him that.

But he took no chances. He played blandly, achieving neither the granitic force that justifies an extrovert interpretation nor the lyrical finesse that validates an introspective one. For the most part, he gave us safe, dull and dutiful Brahms, and it was made all the more prosaic by the lethargic, often ponderous, sometimes even sluggish responses Tate drew from the orchestra.

There was just one saving grace here, both literal and figurative. Ronald Leonard, the principal cellist, brought extraordinarily mellow tone and sensitive inflection to his cantabile solo in the Andante.

After intermission came the Walton symphony--painfully convoluted, more concerned with agonizing pomp than with elevating circumstance, an endless essay in muscular busy-music embellished with contrapuntal frenzy. Tate and the orchestra played it magnificently.

They almost made this gasping relic of a romanticism in bloated decay sound like important music. The conductor resolutely maintained tension amid the sprawl and sustained urgency even when the score tended to contradict it. He knew exactly when to surge onward and when to stall, and he distinguished knowingly between the bona-fide climaxes and the all-too-frequent anticlimaxes.

The strings shimmered, but lost no intensity in the process. The brass blared but didn’t blast. The winds managed to fuse sweetness with strength. Ardor never impeded accuracy.

It was terrific. And it was frustrating.

The program opened with an eloquent tribute to Witold Luto- slawski, the Polish pioneer who died a week ago at 81. Ronald Leonard and Peter Frankl performed the composer’s elegiac “Grave.” The ever-exuberant Friday-night subscribers ignored the management’s request for silent appreciation, and, in fact, went on to disrupt continuity with applause during every Luftpause as the concert progressed.