Nagano Evades Bruckner's Minefield
Allan Ulrich, Chronicle Music Critic
Thursday, April 5, 2001
©2002 San Francisco Chronicle.

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/04/05/DD164155.DTL

Thriving on challenges has been a way of life for the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra for most of its 30 years. Since he became music director in 1978, Kent Nagano has consistently upped the ante, guaranteeing that complacency would not figure in the organization's repertoire.

Even so, Bruckner's Symphony No. 8 in C Minor is not a work any part-time orchestra -- even one as fearless as Berkeley's -- or any conductor rushes into rashly. So, what's wrong with a little midweek miracle? Tuesday's performance of this titan of late Romantic symphonic writing emerged a distinguished affair, a fusion of cogent musicianship from the podium and superior playing from the augmented orchestra, enhanced with the requisite quartet of Wagner tuben.

Nagano devoted the brief first half of the season's third concert to the string-orchestra version of Benjamin Britten's "Lachrymae," featuring the orchestra's sterling principal viola, Linda Ghidossi-DeLuca. Like her counterparts in European orchestras, she returned to her chair for the Bruckner, in which her section (to the right of the podium in the orchestra's configuration) proved one of several factors that kept the Zellerbach Hall audience rooted to its seats for the entire 75-minute performance.

The composer's last completed symphony sets traps for even the name-brand orchestras, and when a conductor chooses the more extended and more satisfactory edition of the score by Robert Haas, the traps can seem like land mines. But, from the string tremolos that launch the first movement in an aura of cosmic foreboding, Nagano's players seemed like extensions of his will.

This was a performance steeped in fervor and informed by structural clarity.

Only in the folksy trio section of the Scherzo did Nagano let the tension slacken temporarily. The conductor enforced linear continuity in the long opening Allegro, building the sonic Brucknerian juggernaut with inexorable pacing.

The almost bacchic feeling of the Trio derived from a canny respect for dynamics. The great Adagio, an interlude of transcendent beauty, scored because of the conductor's coherent tempo relationships and his unhurried pacing.

If Nagano drove home the finale like someone with one eye on the clock, the reading never wanted for pertinent detail and for an ear to Bruckner's climax. The orchestra strings, except for a few releases, were on top of their assignments -- the harmonic underpinnings in the cellos and basses seemed carved out of granite -- and the brass, a few bobbles notwithstanding, outdid themselves.

Britten's introspective "reflections" on a John Dowland air conjured an atmosphere of quiet rapture. If some hesitancy suggested the need for additional rehearsal, DeLuca had the measure of her assignment and then some. Trhe playing, marked by a lovely legato and exquisitely silky attacks, achieved the desired state of muted ecstasy. And ecstasy was precisely what this concert was about.

E-mail Allan Ulrich at aulrich@sfchronicle.com.

©2002 San Francisco Chronicle