Bostonians Play Tribute to Excess

“Eine Alpensinfonie,” which Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra paraded at the Cerritos Center Thursday night, is the great white elephant of Richard Strauss’ tone poems.

It slogs, jogs, soars and thumps for 50 leisurely minutes, delivering detailed facsimiles of Alpine picture-postcards. It stumbles and bumbles in alternate attempts at being super-heroic and suavely lyrical. It is unabashedly sentimental, ceaselessly ponderous and stubbornly indulgent. It pants with cheap effects as it meanders in pursuit of elusive climaxes.

No doubt about it. The piece is bloated and bombastic, carefully calibrated passages of introspection notwithstanding. It tugs shamelessly at push-button emotions and soaks the listener in a tone bath of relentless lushness. It proves ultimately that composers were writing momentous movie scores long before sound came to the cinema. It is, essentially, eine grosse Junk-musik.

I love it.

If nothing else, Strauss had the courage of his tawdry convictions. And, most important, he had the technique to turn low aspirations into high art. This, after all, was the composer who claimed without fear of contradiction that, if necessary, he could “describe a knife and fork in music.”

The “Alpensinfonie,” completed in 1915, represents a mighty gasp of a romanticism in decay. As such, it is a magnificent tribute to excess.

On the relatively rare occasions when it turns up on concert programs these days, conductors tend to accentuate the obvious. That is a serious mistake. Strauss’ mountain lilies require no gilding.

Ozawa is too smart to fall into the trap of augmented gigantism. He approaches the inherent blood and thunder as if it were music intended for Mendelssohn’s midsummer-night fairies. This maestro looks after the little things, knowing full well that the big ones will take care of themselves. He understands that there is no need to stress the obvious. Strauss has done that already.

The Boston Symphony is very much Ozawa’s instrument, and he manipulates it with the elegant nonchalance that comes with decades of intimate interaction. His physical commands tend to be understated, even when the responses are not. The orchestra plays for him with inevitably supple phrasing, with abiding warmth and finesse that is marred only by occasional intonation problems. The Boston sound remains luxurious, even in the rather strident acoustic of the wide-open Cerritos auditorium.

Incidental intelligence: The Alpine ovation--standing, of course--was led by none less than John Williams, former maestro of the Boston Pops (lowbrow alter ego of the BSO) and a composer who knows a thing or two himself about movie music.

As an overture to the Straussian escapade, Ozawa and friends ventured Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony. The performance was lean and clean, almost slick.

For a surprising encore, the visitors previewed coming attractions with an excerpt from Mahler’s Second Symphony, which was scheduled for their second Cerritos program. The idea of playing the recapitulation of the idyllic andante moderato out of context seemed eccentric. The performance turned out to be so exquisitely pointed, so gentle in dynamic, so charming and so poignant, however, that any objection became silly pedantry.