Listening to Yuri Temirkanov perform Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 with the Baltimore Symphony last week has convinced me that we are in for different times, interpretively speaking, than those in which the orchestra's music director was David Zinman.

The ways in which Temirkanov and Zinman perform this familiar symphony are so diametrically opposed that they create an axis around which I spin my wheels every time I think about the possibilities of artistic interpretation.

For one, there are the different ways in which the American-born Zinman and the Russian-born Temirkanov rehearse and conduct. Both are physically graceful conductors. But even with the large gestures Zinman makes with his arms, his conducting style demands that a musician pay most attention to the tip of his baton. That baton conveys a rhythm, which in its accuracy and adherence to the composer's notation makes Zinman unique among modern-day conductors.

With Temirkanov, the musician can't pay attention to the baton -- the Russian doesn't use one. Instead he must watch the whole man: his arms, the expressions on his face, the way his hips move. It is serendipitous that risers have been added to the Meyerhoff's stage. Now the musicians can see all of Temirkanov's body. On a flat stage, they could only have seen see his raised arms.

Zinman's interpretations -- or, more correctly, reinterpretations -- of the Beethoven symphonies were a rite of passage for the BSO when Zinman arrived here 14 years ago. For musicians accustomed to performing these works (and for listeners accustomed to hearing them), Zinman's radical interpretation had the force of revelation. It was as if a painting by an old master had been cleaned; and, without the centuries-old accumulation of dust and lacquer, one could suddenly see what the artist's contemporaries had seen, in all its original glory.

Zinman was aware of the performing traditions that surround the Beethoven Seventh and the way that the enlightened-by-scholarship practitioners on "original instruments" were trying to revamp those traditions. Zinman took this tendency to its logical conclusion. He taught the BSO's musicians new bowings and other ways of articulating Beethoven's phrases so that musicians using modern instruments could approach the possibilities offered by performances on instruments of Beethoven's era.

Temirkanov was equally impressive in other ways. Like Zinman, the 60-year-old Temirkanov has been conducting the Seventh Symphony most of his adult life. And while he is much too intelligent a musician to be unaware of the innovations of the so-called "authenticists," his performance gave the impression that not only did he know nothing about the way performances of Seventh Symphony had changed in the last three decades, but also that he had never heard it performed before. That's how fresh, how unselfconscious and how personal his interpretation was.

If Zinman's conducting seemed to say, "This was the tradition and now hear what I have done to it," Temirkanov's seemed to say ... nothing. His interpretation, apparently intuited directly without any mediating tradition, disappeared into the piece. Zinman's self-conscious approach redefined the Beethoven Seventh within early 19th-century performing parameters; Temirkanov's spontaneous reading was simply the Beethoven Seventh.

Two centuries ago, the German poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller made a useful distinction between "naive" and "sentimental" art. By naive he meant art that conceals art, in which the artist seems to disappear into his artistry, an art that seems unhampered by a defining tradition. By sentimental, Schiller meant an art that is striving and heroic, an art in which it is impossible to forget the figure of the artist as he forges it.

In juxtaposing naive with sentimental, Schiller was juxtaposing Goethe (naive) with himself (sentimental), but the juxtapositions can be extended to Mozart vs. Beethoven, Shakespeare vs. Milton, Michelle Pfeiffer vs. Meryl Streep. Or Temirkanov and Zinman. Neither is greater, it's only that they are different. The same person might prefer the naive one time, sentimental the next. Had I heard Temirkanov immediately after hearing Zinman's first performances of almost 20 years ago, the Russian might have sounded superficial, even simple-minded. Had I heard Zinman last week, immediately after hearing Temirkanov, the American's interpretation might have sounded impossibly affected and tortured.

Each conductor cast a spell so powerful that the listener had no choice but to dwell in it. I am grateful because I had both experiences, though not nearly as grateful as I am to look forward, in the years of Temirkanov's tenure, to having even more of them.

Pub Date: 3/30/99