MSO, cellist Xavier Phillips get personal with Elgar

Friday, I listened to Xavier Phillips play Elgar’s Cello Concerto, with Edo de Waart and the Milwaukee Symphony, as I would listen to a frank and passionate extended confession. Phillips phrased Elgar’s long melodies, many of them loaded with meandering tangents, conversationally. His masterful and somehow intensely intimate reading invited us to simply live with the uncoiling lines. Moods came and went, like clouds passing over the sun. It was a little like My Dinner with Andre: endlessly fascinating, continually disorienting, and in the end miraculously coherent and whole.

The beguiling beauty and enveloping nature of Phillips’ sound had much to do with this. When music draws you so fully into the moment, the importance of a conscious grasp of the passing architecture  fades. Halfway into this 30-minute concerto, I barely knew what movement we were in, much less whether we were amid a rondo or a sonata. And for once I didn’t care.

De Waart opened this engaging program with Hindemith’s clever, jolly Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber. Hindemith drew on relatively minor Weber piano works for movements 1, 3 and 4 and on a Weber overture for a play in this 1943 piece. Hindemith either develops his ideas germinally and gradually or reworks them in discrete variations. Either way, he’s practicing musical sleight of hand. Silk scarves in four colors go into the hat and rabbits come out of it. The last movement, for example, starts as a dreamy waltz made mysterious by a low, velvety pedal tone in the strings and bars here and there with extra beats. Before we know it, Hindemith has made it bright, fleet and chirpy with a coloratura flute obbligato (nice work, there, Jeani Foster). How did we get from there to here? Metamorphic alchemy. De Waart and the orchestra made it sound like fun.

In his Symphony No. 7, Dvorák is his most Brahmsian, most ambitious and most serious self. De Waart and the MSO treated the Seventh like Brahms, with weighty bass lines, taut, dramatic rubato, and abrupt changes not only in volume but in heft. De Waart’s enormously subtlety with accent and with delay or hastening going into the downbeat made the music as elegant and engaging in detail and it was convincing in grand gesture.

He aimed the entire piece to the heroic climax at the very end. This is grand Romantic music of struggle and finally triumph; it’s supposed to provoke standing ovations, and it did Friday. But the big blast would have meant nothing without the quiet moments that prepare it.

Those moments were worth savoring for themselves, too. I’m thinking especially of the delicacy the first violins brought to the second theme of the first movement. De Waart’s hands took on the lightness of butterflies through this passage, and the violinists touched on the notes with the giddy grace of exquisite creatures flitting from petal to petal.

This program, given at Marcus Center Uihlein Hall, will be repeated at 8 p.m. Saturday, June 4. Tickets are $23-$93. Call the MSO ticket line, (414) 291-7605, visit the MSO website or call the Marcus Center box office, (414) 273-7206.