Concert note.(Music)(Concert Review)

Wolfgang Sawallisch, Christoph Eschenbach & Sir Simon Rattle with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Carnegie Hall.

To hear a major orchestra under three eminent conductors in the space of a little more than one month is a privilege. Carnegie Hall was the site on January 13 and 27 and February 23, and the orchestra was Philadelphia's. Two of the conductors--Wolfgang Sawallisch and Christoph Eschenbach--are music directors of the Philadelphia Orchestra; the other, Sir Simon Rattle, was until recently widely believed to be under consideration for the same job, before being named music director of the Berlin Philharmonic. Philadelphia remains one of the few orchestras he guest-conducts (on an every-other-year basis).

The three conductors are quite different in their approaches to music, and each chose works representative of their particular strengths.

Sawallisch's choice (January 13) was Bruckner's Fifth Symphony--an imposing late Romantic work with a strongly upbeat final movement: a tangle of counterpoint and fugue which serves to define Bruckner's compositional preoccupations and which ends in a blaze of brazen glory. An apt choice, therefore, to mark the return of the retired music director (now conductor laureate), as well as a work thoroughly familiar to Sawallisch himself.

Sawallisch arrived in Philadelphia as music director after years as a conductor in Munich, and he has always represented the best of that category known as the Kapellmeister, or solid professional musician. That term usually carries with it a pejorative aura, defining the musicianship as efficient but rarely adventurous or illuminating. In Sawallisch's case, however, it shows itself in its positive features. If Sawallisch's conducting of operas--particularly those of Richard Strauss--has been his greatest asset in Munich, his longtime acquaintance with the whole of the German symphonic tradition resulted in performances of understanding and warmth.

Sawallisch unfolded the richnesses of the Bruckner symphony with a feeling for its structure and its distinctive sound, and the orchestra responded with some of their most persuasive expressive playing, as if the works of Bruckner were as much in their blood as in the blood of the Vienna Philharmonic. It was therefore a memorable tribute both to composer and conductor laureate.

Simon Rattle is of a much younger generation, and his music-making is of quite another kind--brighter-sounding, more alert to the individuality of voices within the orchestra, and generally more extroverted. His concert (January 27) contrasted two Germanic works--the Tenth Symphony (1999-2002) of Hans Werner Henze and the Second of Johannes Brahms. Henze, a German who has lived most of his life in Italy, is a composer more respected than loved or revered, in part because of his own aloofness, and in part because his large output of work is uneven. He is best judged on his many operas, which are as individual and strong a group of works as any in the twentieth century, but he has written well for voice and ballet, and his symphonies have passages of power. The Tenth was commissioned by Paul Sacher, who died before it was completed. Rattle then premiered it with his Birmingham orchestra and subsequently took it to Berlin.