Sleepy Program Marks Pair of Debuts

Guest conductors have it tough. They temporarily inherit an orchestra honed by someone else. They have limited rehearsal time to get across their ideas to the musicians. Most likely they are conducting a program devised by the resident music director. It might not represent their choices, or their strengths.

Like substitute teachers, their authority is limited. And when the guest is a woman, everyone momentarily has to become aware once again of how male-dominated this profession remains, and how that might affect the conductor in question, even in the closing years of the century.

So it was that Anne Manson, music director designate of the Kansas City Symphony, made her Los Angeles Philharmonic debut on Thursday in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

The 37-year-old Manson takes over in Kansas City in 1999, making her one of three women--along with Marin Alsop (with the Colorado Symphony) and JoAnn Falletta (the Long Beach Symphony, the Virginia Symphony and, starting in 1999, the Buffalo Philharmonic)--to lead large American orchestras. On Thursday, Manson offered a solid and respectable showing. The music by Bartok, Korngold and Brahms as orchestrated by Schoenberg wasn’t exactly cutting edge, and Manson, an associate of Claudio Abbado, didn’t especially light any fires.

But she led with a clear, broad beat, kept the music going and demonstrated sensitivity to clear textures and degrees of dynamic. Stylistic niceties may come later.

She opened the program with a careful and restrained account of Bartok’s early “Two Portraits,” in which the two parts sounded more proportionately related rather than representative of the emotional contrasts that best show off the music.

Korngold’s “Abschiedslieder” (Songs of Farewell), which followed, are cut from the same musical cloth as his opera “Die tote Stadt” (The Dead City), composed in the same year, 1920. But attractive as they are, they lack the arresting melodic interest of the opera that once had the musical world heralding the arrival of a new genius.

At least that was the case as the songs were delivered by mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung, who was also making her Philharmonic debut. DeYoung has a schooled, moderately large and burnished voice. But singing with a score, which admittedly she referred to only on occasion, she sounded textually indifferent to the poems by unidentified authors. She was interested in line, not words.

Taken together, the two pieces on the first half seemed designed to put the 19th century to sleep.

Schoenberg orchestrated Brahms’ Piano Quartet No. 1 out of his great affection for the composer and for this inventive and wonderful music. The orchestration remains a marvel, both for detail and for variety. Manson, who led the piece after intermission, elicited welcome full-throated romanticism only in the third movement. She did not exploit thematic or sectional contrasts elsewhere, and textures often sounded clotted. But then this was her first time out in the hall, and doubtless she will have made adjustments in the repeats this weekend.

* Los Angeles Philharmonic, Anne Manson conducting, repeats this program in part today, 2 p.m., and in full Sunday, 2:30 p.m. Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. $8-$30, today; $11-$65, Sunday. (323) 850-2000.