Sleepless in Amsterdam (And Munich)

Jansons is a hit in both cities. In Amsterdam, after the particularity (even fussiness) of his predecessor, Riccardo Chailly, he is viewed as a return to the warm musicmaking of a previous chief conductor, Bernard Haitink, according to the Dutch critic and writer Paul Korenhof. "The old sound came back very quickly," Korenhof said in a recent e-mail exchange.

Since the Concertgebouw does occasional duty as the orchestra for De Nederlandse Opera, it also brought Jansons back to opera for the first time since his heart attack; he led a stunning run of performances of Shostakovich's "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" in 2006 (subsequently released on DVD). "It may have been the greatest success the Netherlands Opera had in the past 10 years or longer," Korenhof said.

Criticisms of Jansons usually focus on his relatively limited repertory: heavy on the 19th and early 20th centuries, light on contemporary music. Gideon Toeplitz, the former managing director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra who was responsible for bringing Jansons to the United States in 1997, pointed out that Jansons and Pittsburgh toured in 2000 with Mahler's Fifth, which is also the centerpiece of today's Washington program. (Jansons might counter that he and the Concertgebouw, which has a profound Mahler tradition cultivated during the 50-year tenure of Willem Mengelberg, are currently embarked upon a Mahler cycle for the orchestra's own label, RCO Live.) Although Jansons says he plays a wide variety of music when he is getting used to a new orchestra -- including Haydn, featured on the Concertgebouw's last Washington program, and not a staple of many major symphony conductors -- European critics have voiced the same reservations. Audiences, however, tend not to complain about a conductor who, instead of pushing them to explore new works, gives them the kinds of things they like.

Jansons's Pittsburgh tenure may not be the best measure of his music-director abilities. There is a hands-on, community focus to the work of an American music director that many European conductors find hard to take. Jansons, in dealing with the public, had certain reservations: When he came out to greet his fans in the lobby after concerts, he preferred to be cordoned off behind a velvet rope.

"He's not a guy who runs up and down Main Street," Toeplitz said.

This reserve, this lack of obvious flashiness, may have been one reason Jansons appeared under-appreciated while he was in Pittsburgh. He is not a conductor who plays the game. His approach is all about musical excellence.

And the aural evidence was that the musicians, schooled by the icily virtuosic Lorin Maazel, were more than ready for Jansons's sometimes inarticulate warmth. At the orchestra's final concerts under Jansons at Carnegie Hall, the national critical confraternity was finally ready to notice that the Pittsburgh orchestra was sounding better than ever. There can be no better measure of a music director than that.