Slatkin's vision for DSO clear with Brahms

Lawrence B. Johnson / Special to The Detroit News

With almost linear precision, you can measure the distance the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and its first-year music director, Leonard Slatkin, have progressed in their few months together.

It's the artistic span from the tentative pass they made at Brahms Fourth Symphony last spring to the glorious Brahms Second Symphony delivered by Slatkin and the DSO on Thursday night at Orchestra Hall.

That rather puzzling, uneventful Brahms Fourth came as conductor and orchestra were still getting to know each other, and as Slatkin was experimenting with seating changes that flipped the violas to the outside and moved the cellos inside, where their sound would project directly into the hall. The immediate result was skewed balances and foggy Brahms.

But Slatkin stuck with that seating plan, and the sound he was after has become clear. His elegantly contoured Brahms Second benefited specifically from the relocation of the cellos and a steady reconditioning of the orchestra that has made all the parts mesh once more.

Like Slatkin's recent Beethoven Third Symphony, this Brahms Second unfolded along Classical lines, serene and beautiful, its inherent Romanticism expressive but unforced. And much of the music's radiant joy sprang from the cellos, in their ardent responses to the winds in the opening movement and in their soaring song that lifted the slow movement heavenward.

Slatkin's tempos were restrained throughout the symphony, but the tension never flagged. The finale's electric surge began almost in understatement and the conductor was careful not to overplay his hand; thus the final, brass-laden burst made the hair stand up -- before the rest of the body joined in acknowledgement of a Brahms Second Symphony to remember.

Slatkin and the DSO will take their Brahms to Florida next week on a five-day tour. But they'll also have another winning card to play in that deal. Along for the trip will be the Argentine-born cellist Sol Gabetta to reprise Thursday night's knock-out performance of Samuel Barber's Cello Concerto.

At age 28, Gabetta may be her generation's most compelling successor to Yo-Yo Ma. Her musical association with Slatkin goes back several years, and she learned Barber's 1945 concerto at his behest for her DSO debut this weekend and the Florida tour. Yet she played the technically challenging, sweepingly lyrical and rhythmically complex work as if it had been written for her.

Watching Gabetta, you get the impression she'd be a natural jazz musician. When she's playing, her left foot never stops tapping; when she's not, her shoulders, arms and head dip and groove to the rhythms behind her. She used a score for this, her first public performance of the Barber, and she did turn pages -- but only because the music in her head cued her to do so. This great concerto is already in her blood and in her soul.

The technical wizard in Gabetta seemed to delight in scampering through the music's most treacherous passages. But she also produced a dark, rich sound that stopped the breath. As if all that were not enough, she answered a ripping ovation with an encore: the feathery magic of Peteris Vasks' "Dolcissimo," in which Gabetta augmented her graceful playing with a wordless song.

Slatkin prefaced the Barber concerto with Peter Mennin's 1952 tone poem "Moby Dick," a turbulent rhapsody that proved to be an ideal set-up for the majestic concision of the concerto that followed.

lawrencebj@gmail.com Lawrence B. Johnson is a cultural writer and critic.