THE BOSTON GLOBE
October 7, 2002

Masur Delights with Humor, Fresh Wonders
by Richard Dyer

Kurt Masur arrived onstage at Symphony Hall yesterday afternoon looking genial, relaxed, and - who knows? - perhaps relieved to have passed the problems of the New York Philharmonic on to someone else. He's not quite a free man - he's still principal conductor of the London Philharmonic and music director of the Orchestre National de France - but he does have more time these days, and he will make an eagerly awaited return to the podium of the Boston Symphony Orchestra later this season.

Meanwhile, Masur brought the London Philharmonic yesterday for a program of Beethoven's First Symphony and Bruckner's Seventh. There was a full complement of strings onstage for the Beethoven symphony, which looks a little alarming in these days of historically informed performance, but Masur knows what he's doing. After all, he has been a professional conductor for 54 years. And one of his most remarkable qualities, evident from the time of his first American concerts, is an ability to make the standard repertoire sound fresh all over again.

His Beethoven was lithe, intelligent, incisive - and funny, too. Unlike many conductors from the German and Central European schools, Masur has a ripe sense of humor. It was delicious to see him toy with the ascending scale that opens the finale, then topple it over from the top into the vivacious, spinning finale. Masur conducts with his whole body, but he doesn't use all of it all of the time. He maintained a pianissimo in the slow movement by hardly moving at all until crescendo time; in the finale, at one moment, he clasped his hands in front of him and led with one of his little fingers. The playing of the London Philharmonic was spirited, precise, and enjoyable, and Masur acknowledged the importance of the second violins in this piece by giving the entire section a bow, something you don't see very often.

The symphonies of Bruckner are appearing more often on concert programs these days, and people are listening to them more attentively, perhaps in response to a spiritual hunger. Not everyone who has been conducting Bruckner lately has any business doing so, but Masur is to the manner born. He has the patience for it, the sense of structure and scale; each movement has only one real climax, rather than a series of premature explosions. Bruckner had his head in the clouds, his feet on the ground, and very few conductors understand both, or can keep them in some kind of balance. Masur can, and the London Philharmonic is perhaps the best orchestra in Britain for this kind of music because so many of its conductors have come from this tradition.

The orchestra sounded splendid over a wide range of dynamics, from the quiet rustle of strings at the beginning to all of those Wagner tubas arriving in full cry. The central Adagio had a wonderful, easy, conversational quality; it didn't struggle to be sublime, but took sublimity for granted. Masur omitted the controversial cymbal crash at the apex of this movement; he didn't need it because the climax had come so inevitably, and with such a sense of destiny and arrival.