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Shostakovich served up well in Escondido by San Diego Symphony and Jonathon Heyward

It’s always worth a trip to the California Center for the Arts, Escondido, to hear the San Diego Symphony play. There’s no better place in the county to experience a large orchestra.

On Wednesday evening, Jonathon Heyward made his debut here, conducting Beethoven’s “Leonore Overture No. 3, Op. 72b”, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 in C Minor, K. 491, and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 9 in E-flat Major, Op. 70.

Heyward is a lanky fellow who beat time with no baton. For the first half’s Beethoven and Mozart, his right thumb, index, and middle fingers came together to move around a 10-inch square space with sharp flicks of the wrist. In the slow movement of Mozart, his conducting area broadened in accord with the Larghetto’s poetry. For a pianissimo passage in Beethoven, he hunkered down to nearly half his height, gradually standing fully upright to illuminate the crescendo.

The orchestra responded well in the first half, although those accustomed to maestro Rafael Payare’s go-for-broke interpretations may have felt the musicians reined in by contrast. Nevertheless, “Leonore” was stirring, with fine solos from flutist Rose Lombardo, bassoonist Valentin Martchev, oboist Sarah Skuster, and offstage trumpeter Christopher Smith.

The pianist in Mozart’s concerto was Yeol Eum Son, whose even, clean playing emphasized elegance over the drama usually associated with this work. The Symphony, pared down to chamber orchestra size, counterbalanced Son’s disciplined restraint with excitement.

Has any composer’s reputation been repaired with a single book the way that “Testimony” boosted Shostakovich’s stock in the West? Published in 1979 as the Cold War began to heat up again, the portrayal of Shostakovich as a clever subversive, sneaking dissident messages into his music, appealed to Americans.

Shostakovich allegedly dictated “Testimony” to Solomon Volkov, but his widow, composer colleagues, and Shostakovich scholar Laurel Fay believe that much was fabricated by Volkov.

Listeners determined to uncover evidence of Shostakovich’s musical dissidence will find it in the Ninth Symphony. The unvarying two-note trombone motive in the first movement that initiates military music and later interrupts the orchestra to insist on the key? That’s Stalin.

Composed shortly after Nazi Germany’s defeat, there’s little debate that Shostakovich did not deliver a noble paean to the people’s struggle during the Great Patriotic War, upsetting Soviet officials. Whatever its motivation, this charming work is a breath of fresh air in the middle of his dour symphonic output — only his first and 15th symphonies share a similar sense of light humor and hilarity.

Heyward and the orchestra played the first and last movements as laugh-out-loud larks. Heyward’s conducting gestures really opened up. He even did a little podium dance in the last movement, and the musicians responded with energy and glee.

Among many solos, none was more important than Valentin Martchev’s bassoon work. The brief fourth movement is the one dark moment in the symphony —trombone and tuba octave blasts cut off the spirited third movement. All is somber. The bassoon plays a melancholy line, at times unaccompanied, that seems about to end in tragedy, when it unexpectedly tumbles into the circus gallops of the last movement.

This was a bracing account of an infrequently programmed Shostakovich symphony, heard in a venue that boosted the presence of the strings and clarified textures. You haven’t heard how well our orchestra can sound — at least in San Diego County — until you’ve heard them at the CCAE.

Hertzog is a freelance writer.