Evan Rogister, an eloquent young guest conductor

Guest conductor Evan Rogister showed particular sensitivity to the exquisite melodies in Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings at Friday night’s Milwaukee Symphony concert. Rogister’s awareness to the subtleties of the Elégie especially hit home. He phrased the opening scales as if delivering them parlando. Imagine a spoken eulogy so eloquent as to conjure the spirit of the departed before the assembled; that’s where the rhythm came in to support one of Tchaikovsky’s noblest and most beautiful melodies. The MSO’s strings played and harmonized with an otherworldly grace and transparency, until the composer and their young conductor brought them back into the prosaic world of ordinary speech at the end.

I’ve heard this piece at least 300 times, but I’d never heard it quite that way.

Rogister, a singer before he took up conducting, had equally compelling ideas about all four movements of the Serenade. He expressed them through his long, sinuous arms, which promoted a gorgeous legato and rich, viscous tone in the slow music. All that being said, I think the Serenade might have drawn the short straw in rehearsal. Ensemble was messy in all the fast music — a minor distraction in a thoughtful reading, but a distraction still.

I wondered whether that would be the case in Sibelius’ formidable Symphony No. 2. It wasn’t. Both Rogister, a late sub for Vassily Sinaisky, and the MSO showed complete technical command and great precision throughout this complex work.

This is Valhalla music, aglow with resonant harmonies and abounding in grand gestures suggestive of ancient mountains and forests. It calls for a good deal of interpretive flex. I liked the way Rogister set certain statements apart, left a little space and then started a new Sibelius paragraph, so to speak. Other times, he let impulses run on like avalanches. His choices felt not only right but inevitable.

Rogister’s a big, athletic-looking fellow, and he used his trim body to expressive advantage, hunching his shoulders and crouching a bit, then rolling out his spine to reflect the many bass rumblings that sound as if they are rising from the center of the earth. This conductor is fun to watch, but I also believe his choreography got results. The MSO did give him sounds especially stirring and deep for his effort.

Mark Niehaus, the MSO’s long-time principal trumpeter, was the soloist in Alexander Arutiunian’s 1949 Concerto in A-flat. The single-movement piece is a sort of developing rondo, with a structure of Intro-A-B-A1-C-A2-Cadenza-Coda. The A theme is built on an ornamented fanfare that brings the Spanish bull ring to mind.The muted C section sounds like a high-brow pop song arrangement from the 1940s. You could just about fox-trot to it. It’s nice.

But structure and allusion are not the main points of the piece. The point is to make the trumpet sound glorious and for the trumpeter to make that look and sound easy. Niehaus made a big sound with no strain in it. He hit the bull’s-eye of every pitch. He painted Arutiunian’s lines with well-chosen, varied, beautiful timbres. He rendered rhythms so crisply that you could feel the mathematical proportions. He also let phrases breathe; he let the last note of a phrase zip around Uihlein Hall and finally disappear before starting the next phrase. He played with assertive brilliance or with a luscious, relaxed legato, as the moment required.

You couldn’t leave the hall without thinking: That trumpet player is really good, and that’s what this concerto is all about.

This program will be repeated at 8 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 14, at Marcus Center Uihlein Hall.  Tickets range from $25 to $102. Call 414 291-7605, visit the MSO website or call the Marcus Center box office, 414 273-7206.