Concert note.

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.

Henze's signature strength, in opera also but certainly in his orchestral music, lies in his sense of color and contrast, and this symphony glories in it--though (as usual) his weakness for a jungle of percussion instruments in loud array overbalanced the whole. One could perhaps wish for a greater sense of shape, and a more determined wielding of the blue pencil, but this symphony is worth hearing again. To contrast it with the serene certainties of the Brahms is to examine two sides of a German coin, and Rattle's innate sense of color and highlighting of voices added to the contrast. His somewhat mercurial--and certainly dynamic--presence on the podium is a notable asset for the concertgoer, because, with Rattle, one can never exactly predict what will take place in performance. His questing spirit, in evidence in his adventurous program-making as in his conducting, as well as his plans for the future with Berlin, ensures that Rattle will remain a significant podium presence wherever and whenever he appears.

Dynamic podium presence is also a feature of Christoph Eschenbach, Philadelphia's incoming music director. He can be said to have hit the ground running. He conducts by gyrating and slashing the air with bold strokes, and this power energized the performance of the Mahler Third Symphony, even with the lethargic tempos he selected at times, and despite some tentative orchestral playing (as its result?). He obviously was intent on establishing control over the orchestra with the performance, with the question remaining as to whether, in this symphony especially, this sort of micromanaging was appropriate.

Mahler's Third is the most optimistic, sunniest, and most joyful of Mahler's symphonies. It represents (with its pendant, the Fourth) the outward--at times childlike--humor of the composer, which was to darken and curdle over into the elegaic resignation of the Abschied of Das Lied von der Erde, and the harrowing last movement of the Ninth. Of course, this symphony has its clouds as well, most notably in the immensely evocative offstage Posthorn solo of the third movement (gorgeously played!). Its last movement, the noble tribute to "love" (if you want to believe the "program" that Mahler later discarded), which has roots in both Beethoven and, quite clearly, Wagner, can be considered the last pure efflorescence of German Romanticism, and in almost any competent performance is unbearably moving.

Eschenbach allowed that movement its space and its time, while building it to a triumphant yet restrained close. Earlier, he had treated the work as if it was one of the later more neurasthenic symphonies, to its detriment. His excessively slow tempo for the alto song "O Mensch" brought it repeatedly to a standstill, though it presented no legato vocal problems to the soloist, the extraordinary Lorraine Hunt Lieberson.

Eschenbach clearly wants to make an early, forceful entrance as music director of a symphony orchestra with a great and long tradition. The orchestra has been given a fifty million dollar grant from the Annenberg Foundation for additional programming outreach, which will include family concerts on Sundays, interdisciplinary festivals, and the opportunity for opera, with the orchestra in the pit of its Academy of Music (which they own, though they play in the new Verizon Hall). As with Rattle in Berlin, it will be interesting to see what develops with Eschenbach in Philadelphia.