Blomstedt makes a halting case for Bruckner

[...] Thursday, Feb. 25’s matinee performance by the San Francisco Symphony under Conductor Laureate Herbert Blomstedt yielded mixed emotions at best.

On the one hand, Blomstedt is a committed and expert advocate for Bruckner’s music, capable of rendering it with all the spaciousness and fervor that it warrants.

The strings mustered a lean but golden texture, and the brass sections — aside from a couple of exposed bobbles — made a gleaming and vigorous contribution.

When the piece comes to a sudden halt — a Brucknerian thumbprint that in later works heralds a key point in an ongoing narrative — you can almost hear the composer thinking to himself, “Now, what would Wagner do?”

The symphony’s vaporous beginning — the most explicit of Bruckner’s many rewrites of the opening of Beethoven’s Ninth — emerged with all its shimmery mystery intact, and the slow movement boasted near-Wagnerian lushness.

The first half of the concert marked the long-overdue Symphony debut of pianist Maria João Pires, who was a nimble and often eloquent soloist in Beethoven’s Third Concerto.

From the weighty harmonies of the piano’s unaccompanied opening phrases through the subsequent interchanges with the orchestra, Pires’ playing tapped into a wealth of expressive majesty.