SAN FANCISCO CHRONICLE
April 1, 2005

Masur's strudy hand coaxes bold surprises from Mozart
Joshua Kosman

When Kurt Masur conducts an orchestra, he makes his presence felt. Persuasive or not — and he's led both kinds here over the years — his performances boast an imposing, almost physical presence that can sweep a listener along.

Masur was in fine form Wednesday night as he began a two-week guest stint with the San Francisco Symphony, leading a potent rendition of Bruckner's Ninth Symphony and an even more alluring account of Mozart's "Linz" Symphony in Davies Symphony Hall.

This was an odd pairing, since Mozart's zippy elegance doesn't relate in any obvious way to Bruckner's expansive grandiosity. But Masur conjured up a common ground through his own emphasis on weighty sound and sober cogency, and the results were impressive.

His approach was more surprising — and perhaps because of that, all the more illuminating — in the Mozart. The performing forces were pared down, with just a handful of players for each string part, but the sonorities had plenty of sonic heft.

Masur harnessed that sound to produce a reading that was at once robust and translucent. Especially in the two outer movements, he made every phrase and every rhythmic gesture count; the slow movement, with Masur at times beating each eighth note, moved with a compelling combination of resoluteness and grace.

Bruckner's Ninth, left unfinished at his death, is another sort of beast entirely, a far-reaching attempt to probe the mysteries of the composer's spiritual universe (and who else but Bruckner, that endearingly naive believer, would have thought to dedicate a symphony to God?).

When the piece was last heard in San Francisco, in 1999, Michael Tilson Thomas appended the composer's "Te Deum" in place of the finale that Bruckner didn't live to write. Masur presented only the three surviving movements, making a more poignant effect by breaking off just when things were getting interesting.

The interruption was felt all the more keenly because Masur took a grandly architectural view of the work, in contrast to Thomas' livelier and more kinetic approach. In his rendition, the long-range interconnections of the music — its tonal wanderings, its melodic cross-references — took center stage.

Details occasionally suffered as a result, including some patchy string playing in the slow movement and coordination problems in exposed passages throughout. But the overall effect of the performance was never less than powerful.

The first movement sounded particularly strong, its mysterious textures compounded of ghostly whispers and bold, fleshly authority. A similar contrast shaped the scherzo, and the slow movement gained in urgency as it progressed. The lack of a finale was heart-breaking, like some kind of phantom limb made more palpable by its absence.