Masterly Mendelssohn, boring Brahms

Confronting perfection in the form of the Mendelssohn

Violin Concerto

and Brahms

Symphony No. 2

revealed its special challenges at Thursday's Philadelphia Orchestra concert: If a composer's balance of form and content, not to mention variation and unity, is as perfect as the mind can imagine, how do you get close enough to illuminate that?

For all of his lumps and dents, Beethoven requires a level of strategy that can yield all manner of fresh phrase readings. But few works, even by Mendelssohn and Brahms, have such form-fitting parts amid consistent inspiration as these two works. The surfaces, particularly, seem so compositionally effortless, so inevitable in their progression between events, that the temptation is to keep a respectful distance - even though such detachment is hardly the route to a vital performance.

The solutions, and lack of them, came from unlikely places.

Having had the previous bad luck to hear nothing but phoned-in performances from the popular, Philadelphia-born violinist Sarah Chang, an original, personal reading of the Mendelssohn was the last thing I expected from her. But that's what I got. Despite my doubts, as she employed her flamboyant Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg-style choreography, Chang commanded the piece from the first moment, shading every phrase with a question, answer and yet another question that created a succession of musical gems that were polished but not slick. There was real emotional impact in the second movement and its mini-soliloquy coda. Her virtuoso dash in the final movement had a welcome, vulgar edge. You could seriously rediscover the concerto in a performance like this.

In contrast, the Brahms symphony, a work that germinates so elegantly from its first three notes, just sat there in a performance led by the esteemed guest conductor Jirí Belohlávek.

Nothing was wrong and much was right, in a performance that was neither here nor there: Tempos were moderate and conventional, and deployed with no particular vigor. Though I welcome altered manifestations of the Philadelphia Orchestra sound, this incarnation was reined in, similar to Belohlávek's nicely detailed Brahms recordings with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, but not to any great purpose.

Curiously, the concert's primary casualty was one of Belohlávek's specialties - the music of Martinu, namely the orchestra's first performances of the

Toccata e due canzoni

. The needs of this superb 1946 neoclassic piece - its lean string sonorities taking on a clean, metallic edge thanks to the near-constant participation of the piano - don't coincide with this orchestra's strengths.

In the first movement, rhythm is often the music's primary expressive entity, and the Philadelphia Orchestra's rendering of that felt either slightly messy or more-than-slightly careful. The second movement, whose modal individuality suggests folk music from an obscure civilization, was the one place where I felt like I was getting the piece.

I've heard that Belohlávek works wonders with Martinu's dense, idiosyncratic

Julietta

at the cantankerous Opera National de Paris. But the

Toccata

's balance of chic, stylish surfaces and deep musical pondering could only be enjoyed here by listening

past

the orchestra's unidiomatic, only semi-comprehending performance.