When the tiny, Yoda-like figure first appeared on the stage of Davies Hall tonight, the massive, steady applause sounded very much as if Cal Ripken Jr. walked into the hall. Just as the great shortstop made a virtue of "showing up," Alicia de Larrocha has endured. She made her US debut in San Francisco 48 years ago. Tonight, at 79, she was about to play her farewell performance here. The audience celebrated her before she played a note, acknowledging those 80-plus performances over a half a century, but Larrocha just waved at the crowd tolerantly, kicked the piano bench into position, and went to work. Workmanlike too was the performance, the Haydn Piano Concerto, steady, cautious, on the dry side. Falla's "Nights in the Gardens of Spain" was richer, more alive, but the real singing came from Peter Wyrick's cello and other string principals. At the end, a standing ovation for Larrocha and a rare orchestra fanfare salute. On the podium for the evening, was Finnish conductor Osmo Vanska, music-director designate of the Minnesota Orchestra. You'll hear a lot from and about this youthful 49-year-old. Extremely talented, but often erratic, he brings Simon Rattle-like focus and intensity to the music, but then he substitutes volume for power, bluster for a solid, big sound. The concert's first half belonged to Larrocha, but with the Nielsen Third Symphony, the second half was for the conductor to conquer or fail. He did a bit of both. He can an experienced conductor leap onto the podium and start up the mighty engine of the "Sinfonia espansiva" before regaining balance on landing... or allowing the orchestra a moment to hear what they will play before they actually do? As the result of such a simple blunder, the first five minutes of the opening Allegro was rushed and unbalanced. Later in the movement, the great rolling tutti sounded noisy at times, but the orchestra played extremely well, the brass especially impressive. To the conductor's credit, transparent texture brought woodwinds forward, so the listener could hear strangely Stravinsky-like passages seldom given such prominence. The good Vanska showed up also in the second movement with a gorgeous sound in the quiet, mysterious passages, He got excellent work from the orchestra, and soprano Twyla Robinson and baritone Hugh Russell in their wordless solos. What should be a precisely snappy rhythm in the third movement became something less than that, making the listener nostalgic for Herbert Blomstedt's Nielsen, often heard in Davies. With Vanska, some phrases that should be distinct were not allowed to breathe sufficiently, another characteristic that suffers in comparison with Blomstedt. Still, the concluding movement unfolded very well, the uneven, now-good-now-troubled performance ending on a high note. Janos Gereben/SF [log in to unmask]