If conductor Daniel Lewis is remembered for anything in these parts, it is probably for having canceled his guest engagements here 10 years ago in the wake of what some regarded as the Utah Symphony's premature appointment of Varujan Kojian as its music director.
The folly of that action (i.e., the decision to cancel) became all the more apparent Friday in Symphony Hall on the occasion of Lewis' belated debut with the orchestra. For on the strength of this concert I should have judged him a strong contender not only then but three years later when a replacement for Kojian was being sought.True, he does not seem a particularly charismatic or inspiring leader. But then neither is Joseph Silverstein, and Lewis seems to me at least his equal when it comes to such matters as stick technique and drawing the best from an orchestra.
At least no one seemed in doubt as to what he wanted Friday, from the splash of Kabalevsky's "Colas Breugnon" Overture, here brilliant but controlled, to the smoldering passion of Prokofiev's Symphony No. 5, its fire and ice oh-so-carefully balanced. In each instrumental textures were clarified without diminishing the piece's essential character, namely the breezy exuberance of the first and the joy vs. pain of the last. (The composer himself claimed it was a tribute to "the spirit of man.")
Thus playing in the Prokofiev was clean but not overrefined, with a nice edge to the winds and a hint of steel in the strings. Yet the music's lyricism was always in evidence, as was its rhythmnic fiber, particularly in the percussive tatoo of the scherzo and the energetic lift of the finale, which here happily found the woodwinds on their toes.
Perhaps climaxes in the first and third movements might have burned a bit more corrosively, accentuating the music's anguish. Nor am I sure that Lewis' slowish tempo for the central section of the scherzo made it all that easy to get back up to speed for the finish. But the heat was there and so was the technical and interpretive savvy that brought the latter off without undue mishap.
Earlier one of those woodwinds, principal clarinetist Christie Lundquist, showed up as soloist in the first of Carl Maria von Weber's two concertos for that instrument, the Op. 73 in F minor.
A longtime Lewis partisan (both are out of USC), she always seems at her best as a soloist and Friday was no exception. For here she managed to catch both the music's dark-hued romantic interior, with its strong anticipations of "Der Freischuetz," as well as its virtuoso character, which is considerable.
That meant an exquisitely shaded opening movement, with every run and glide in place, a gorgeously nocturnal Adagio and a finale whose tongue-in-cheek humor registered almost as strongly as its mechanical trickery, here tossed off seemingly without effort.
Lewis, for his part, contributed a characterful accompaniment, here of almost Mozartean proportions, in which the drama never got out of hand. That same control kept his soloist audible even at the lowest end of the dynamic scale and the horns in balance through their lovely trio in the slow movement (for which they took a well-earned bow).
More important, he succeeded in erasing one memory and replacing it with another. Even if it was 10 years late.
-REPEAT PERFORMANCE: I have not heard Neemi Jaervi's Prokofiev Fifth, on Chandos, but can enthusiastically recommend Jansons (Chandos), Karajan (DG) and Ormandy (CBS, cassette only), followed by Previn (Philips) and Slatkin (RCA). The call is a bit tougher in the Weber concerto, where recordings range from the period tang of Anthony Pay, on Virgin, to the full-blown romanticism of Richard Stoltzman, on RCA, with the more straightforward Hilton (Chandos) and Meyer (EMI) renditions falling somewhere in between.