With the San Diego Symphony playing at a high level not heard since the Atherton era (and arguably even better than that), conductor Jahja Ling keeps raising the bar in his programming. In the past two seasons they’ve done justice to colorful showcases like Mahler’s 2^nd Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde, Strauss’s Heldenleben and Alpensinfonie, and Respighi’s Pines of Rome.

This weekend Ling trotted out his thoroughbred ensemble for an honest-to-God festival with a different overture and concerto every single night. The one constant in all three programs was Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances.

It wasn’t Rachmaninoff’s study in orchestral bloat and tedium that sold the hall out, nor was it John Harbison’s modest but effective opener, Remembering Gatsby. The masses had assembled to hear superstar pianist Lang Lang.

He was originally scheduled to perform Schumann’s Piano Concerto. The choice was intriguing—Lang Lang has not recorded that work (or much Schumann at all). It’s not an obvious match for this pianist who gravitates towards extravagance. However, shortly before the festival kicked off, a program change was announced—Lang Lang would perform Chopin and Liszt instead, a more natural fit for this extrovert keyboardist.

Chopin’s Andante spianato et grande polonaise brillante has an unusual form—the first part is a gorgeous slow movement for piano solo, followed by a heroic polonaise in which the orchestra participates—but it’s really the piano’s show, from beginning to end. Lang Lang immediately established a poetic mood with diaphanous arpeggios in his left hand to create a lush tonal web, above which floated a warm cantabile melody in the right hand. The illusion of creating a singing line on the piano—an instrument where notes begin to die away as soon as they’re struck—is something for which most pianists strive. Few achieve the ravishing tone that Lang Lang produced. His softest notes were so delicate that they verged on inaudibility; were the keys struck any more gently, they might not even sound.

In the Grande Polonaise Brillante, the languorous sentiment of the first part is cast aside in favor of bravura. Lang Lang played this heroic dance cleanly yet passionately, with dazzling technique. Piano aficionados may be burned out from all the Chopin performances in 2010, yet Lang Lang’s rendition of this gallant composition was so captivating that no one could have complained.

Ling led the orchestra in a solid accompanying job, but Lang Lang‘s performance was so compelling that the musicians could have stayed offstage, and no one would have noticed.

Chopin was just a warm up for the thunder and fire of Liszt’s Piano Concerto no. 1. Lang Lang once again fired off rapid octaves and arpeggios with astounding precision and energy, and captured the serene poetry of Liszt’s introspective and soft music. A big noisy concerto like Liszt’s can cover up sloppy finger work, but Lang Lang hit every note in the work, and played them with soulful artistry. His tempo in the coda of the concerto was absolutely terrifying, roaring octave passagework in both hands that was impossibly accurate. Accounts of Liszt’s performances in the 19^th century frequently describe him as demonic, and that adjective would suit the superhuman piano work of Lang Lang.

The orchestra has a much more substantive role in Liszt’s concerto, and the musicians wonderfully matched Lang Lang’s poetry and drama. Special mention should be given to clarinetist Sheryl Renk, oboist Sarah Skuster, and concertmaster Jeff Thayer for their lovely playing during the Adagio.

It would be easy to make fun of Lang Lang’s stage mannerisms—extraneous and unnecessary gestures such as conducting himself with a free hand or the slowly arcing hand off the keyboard when finished with a phrase. I’ve never seen someone play air trills before, but that’s what Lang Lang did—his left hand fingers trilling two or three feet above the keys while his right hand played an actual trill. However, anyone who can coax such a beautiful tone from a piano, or play with such speed and precision, must receive a critical Pass, no matter what theatrics happen on stage.

Following the Liszt concerto, the crowd roared heartfelt approval, demanding three curtain calls from Lang Lang. After the third, he sat down to play Chopin’s Etude in A flat major, Op. 25, no. 1. Both hands created gentle sonic ripples, on which floated a sensuously played melody by his right hand pinkie. The delineation between the murmuring arpeggios and the melody and bass lines was sublime.

The concert opened with John Harbison’s Remembering Gatsby, an overture which the symphony has programmed in the past on at least two other occasions. Harbison attracted attention when The Met produced his opera, The Great Gatsby in 1999, but Remembering Gatsby dates back 14 years before that, when his opera was a mere twinkle in his eyes. Crafted around a pastiche of a Jazz Age dance orchestra number, Remembering Gatsby takes that 32-bar song and subjects it to distortions and diversions. It’s a catchy enough number that the listener can easily follow how the tune jumps off track and gets back on again in its repetitions.

This dance band number is framed by a grand, slow fanfare-like music, in which dissonances clash within otherwise obvious tonal harmonies. No matter how dissonant or chromatic Harbison’s music gets, there is always an underlying tonal framework beneath it.

Harbison has an ear for arresting sonorities, an original way of arranging chords so that one hears harmonies in a completely new way (Stravinsky, Copland, and Britten all had this talent as well). It’s tempting to call him a conservative composer, but his music never sounds like it’s rehashing older styles. He has carved out his own original voice within the classical music tradition, one in which melody and harmony still prevail, but those melodies and harmonies are unique to Harbison. There is an admirable balance between the Apollonian and the Dionysian in his music; musical craft is evident, but it never gets in the way of expression. It’s usually a pleasure to hear his music live, and Remembering Gatsby is no exception to that.

It was given a clean and attractive performance by Ling and the Symphony, a nicely nuanced reading which emphasized contrasts within sections. The uncredited soprano saxophonist cleanly played out the dance tune melody without irony, and the brass section deserves mention as well for its solid contribution in this work.

My colleague Ken Herman dealt briefly with Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances in his review of Friday’s show, and I don’t have much to add. There are Rachmaninoff works which I cherish—the second and third piano concertos; The Bells; The Rhapsody on the Theme of Paganini; many of his songs and solo piano compositions. However, any joys which may lurk within the Symphonic Dances elude me, even if performed as capably as Ling and the Symphony did.

Many music scholars these days relate music in metaphors of the human body, a theory known as corporeality. Cribbing from them, if the San Diego Symphony program for this concert can be considered a human body, Remembering Gatsby was the witty mind of the program, Chopin and Liszt the heart and guts of the program, and the 45-minute Symphonic Dances of Rachmaninoff, a massive fecal impaction.

For a copy of the program, click here.