MUSIC REVIEW : Sanderling Masters Ninth at Pavilion

One day after the composer’s 222nd birthday, the Los Angeles Philharmonic returned, as it seems to once in every calendar year, to the monumental challenges of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

This time, Kurt Sanderling, who had led an exceptional performance of this supreme symphonic monument with the orchestra seven seasons ago--after which he was dubbed “Podium Hero of the Year” in the 1986 Beckmesser Awards--returned to lead the Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Master Chorale and a strong quartet of vocal soloists through the work’s profound intricacies.

Sanderling did not disappoint. Thursday night, before a cheering crowd in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Music Center, he led an intermissionless, single-work program devoted only to the Ninth. And brought his customary comprehensiveness to the task.

The instrumentalists of the orchestra played at that level of concentration they sometimes muster for special occasions, and with a rare transparency, if also with more metallic sounds than one prefers.

The L.A. Master Chorale, always challenged by the awkwardnesses of the composer’s vocal writing, did not sound mellow, or optimally cohesive, yet met all requirements of range and dynamics gamely.

Well-matched and individually expressive, the solo vocal quartet--Sylvia McNair, Susan Quittmeyer, Vinson Cole and John Cheek--performed nobly, and with admirable enunciation of the German text.

These four were aided furthermore by being seated just in front of the Master Chorale, behind the Philharmonic, and several feet above the stage, from where their voices tended to resemble trumpets more than flutes.

Less quirky and more thoughtful than one remembers, the current approach to this masterpiece by the 80-year-old Sanderling no longer specializes in striking details, but moves along with a certain inevitability.

The result--admittedly more analytical than spontaneous--contains an opening movement that seems to be accomplished in a single but expansive breath, a Scherzo characterized at once by both irritability and repose and a slow movement apparently inexorable, but never protracted, in its rhetoric.

Thursday, the choral finale gave evidence of being the least thoroughly prepared of these four movements, with consequent imbalances and raggednesses of attack from all forces.

Still, the total reading, if not the most affecting, or most deeply probing, one can remember, achieved a statement of genuine musical stature.