Swan song?

ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, the Seattle Symphony has had one hell of a great year: ticket sales topping projections, fund raising on track, the new hall a hit with the public and artists alike, the orchestra sounding better than it ever has. There's only one little cloud to diminish all that sunshine. The orchestra sounds good all the time; but it consistently sounds a lot better when its music director Gerard Schwarz isn't on the podium.

This is something that happens, particularly when a leader and a band have been together for a long time. Even couples happily married for decades can go through patches when they start wondering if it's worth the trouble now that the kids are grown: Familiarity alone can breed, if not contempt, at least forgetfulness of better times. And the 16-year marriage between Schwarz and the SSO has been showing signs of strain for sometime.

Some trace the real trouble to the conflict between conductor and players over the hiring—forced by Schwarz—of John Cerminaro to lead the orchestra's horn section. Schwarz publicly admitted feeling insulted when the players on the audition committee voted against hiring Cerminaro, Schwarz's hand-picked candidate. The players felt just as burned when Schwarz, in retaliation, persuaded the symphony board not to ratify a new contract with the players unless Cerminaro was installed as principal horn for as long as Schwarz held the podium.

Badly as that passage of arms damaged conductor-player relations, a contract promising substantial (well-deserved, and long-delayed) salary hikes and the excitement of moving at last from the cotton-wool acoustic of the Opera House into a hall designed to enhance symphonic music would probably have smoothed things over if l'affaire Cerminaro had been the only cause of friction.

The fact is, dissatisfaction had been growing for sometime, at least among the players; a dissatisfaction due, as often happens, not to a failure to perform on Schwarz's part, but in consequence of having done his job too well. In terms of personnel, the Seattle Symphony is today substantially the same erratic and demoralized group Schwarz took over from an ailing Rainer Miedel back in 1983. That it sounds like a different orchestra entirely—confident, consistent, technically accomplished—is in large measure due to Schwarz's patience, persistence, and professionalism. It is he who built the orchestra's present self-confidence.

But self-confidence, as every parent learns, ultimately brings in its wake independence, a penchant for thinking and making judgments on one's own. The less they have collectively been troubled by their own shortcomings and the more confident they have grown in their ability to meet an exacting standard, the more critical have the SSO players become of their leader's own shortcomings, and the less willing to discount or forgive them.

Those—relative—shortcomings have been cruelly apparent in the course of the orchestra's first season at the Benaroya. On the wide spectrum of conducting styles, from the micromanagement of a Pierre Boulez to the apparently oblivious abandon of a Bernstein, Schwarz falls far toward the controlling end. He cues even those entrances players could make in their sleep; "Watch me" is a frequent injunction. This level of concentration is valuable in keeping an orchestra alert, and even an absolute requirement in playing difficult, unfamiliar music with minimal rehearsal—something the SSO, given the sheer number of works it has to get through in its leader's ambitious annual roster of premieres and recordings, has to be grateful for, at least on the occasions when his cueing is the only thing keeping the performance from falling apart.

But conductors who take their job title as literally as Schwarz does are not, on the whole, among the ones most beloved by musicians. Musicians want to cut loose, fly, soar when they play; they want to feel that lift like an oceanic swell that only those who've played in a large orchestra ever experience. It's difficult, if not impossible, to achieve that state of satori when you have to "watch me."

TWO GUEST CONDUCTORS this spring demonstrated, in very different ways, the thrill of musicmaking on the fly. Neville Marriner, the British-born conductor who brought the Minnesota Orchestra well-deserved acclaim, represented one extreme approach. So casual and nonspecific on the podium in rehearsal that the players found themselves in catastrophic discord in a work as relatively familiar as Strauss' Rosenkavalier Suite, Marriner was unfazed, saying only, according to one player: "Well, we shall have to have another go at that tomorrow, won't we?" Another go they had at it, and this time, "We didn't wait for him to tell us everything, we listened to each other and did it ourselves." The result was sheer rapture, and received rapturously as well.

In rehearsal, Jesus Lopez-Cobos, a guest from Cincinnati, is a conductor of an utterly different stripe. Meticulous to the point of mania, he "practically goes through the score bar by bar, one bar forward, two bars back. It's maddening, and it's definitely not fun." But when performance time comes around, Lopez-Cobos seems to forget all that. Control is for rehearsal, now we play. And play they did, with an effortless sense of phrase, a dancing momentum, and a sumptuous tactility of sound that this orchestra has never before achieved in this listener's experience. In comparison with the best musicmaking we've heard this season, the best Schwarz performances have seemed a bit angular, knocked off, unappealing, routine. It hardly seems grateful to say it, considering that we wouldn't have Benaroya Hall without a decade of relentless hard work by Schwarz, but after some of the dazzling musical surprises we've been treated to this season, the notion of a Seattle Symphony sans Schwarz is one to be contemplated, perhaps with sadness, but also with equanimity.