SF Symphony keeps making waves with Schumann

The combination of Michael Tilson Thomas, the San Francisco Symphony and the symphonies of Robert Schumann is shaping up to be a dazzling partnership, marked by robust instrumental playing and canny interpretive decisions.

Wednesday’s performance reveled in the physicality of the composer’s orchestral palette — the heavy string textures that can sound clotted if not handled with care, and the blazing brass fanfares, harking back to similar openings in symphonies by Schubert and Haydn.

The lopsided rhythms of the first movement — so determined to keep both performers and listener just a bit off-kilter — sounded a little shaky right out of the gate, but conductor and orchestra soon found their footing and gave the music a propulsive sleekness.

Thomas shaped this music with powerful intensity, reaching deep into the movement’s expressive undercurrents, and the orchestra summoned rich reserves of instrumental color in the service of the interpretation.

The Orchestral Variations — one of the foundational works in Copland’s modernist vein — and the craggy, forbidding serial work “Inscape” offered a daunting one-two punch, notwithstanding the fierce commitment of the performance.

In a lighter vein there was the composer’s jazzy Piano Concerto of 1926, where “jazz” is shorthand for the most superficial stylistic signifiers of blue notes, muted brass and jaunty duple meters.