In 23 years of performances here, since his Merola days, seldom has Thomas Hampson sung better than tonight. He stood and delivered in Davies Hall, almost completely without the mannerisms that had crept up in his appearances in recent years. The voice was warm, natural, unpushed, unwavering; diction - as always - flawless, the interpretation straightforward, committed, just right. In one of Michael Tilson Thomas's unusual and interesting San Francisco Symphony programs, Hampson followed Richard Strauss' all-brass "Festival Music for the City of Vienna" with two orchestral songs, one hardly known, the other known even less. You might have encountered the four-minute "Hymnus" before, one of the composer's most overwrought, glorious exercises in romantic excess, a pounding, harp- and string-filled surfeit of "golden light... flowing essence... eternal spirit... wreathes of laurel." Audience members with long memory recall that Thomas Allen sang it here first, in 1985, Wolfgang Sawallisch conducting. Rarer than hen's teeth, "Notturno" is the first of two songs of Strauss' Opus 44, named in the Prussian manner "Two Larger Songs for Deep Voice with Orchestral Accompaniment." With a 14-minute length, "Notturno" might have easily had the other song tacked on to the program, but that didn't happen, so chances are that we'll never hear it. Featuring a great deal of narrative (Richard Dehmel's poem about moon, swoon, pain, tears, guilt, sorrow and the moon - "hung high, and gentle and weary" - returning at the end), "Notturno" sounds a bit like a talky transition passage between two high points in "Capriccio." Both pieces feature extensive obbligato by the concertmaster, and it was a heartwarming (and well-justified) action when Hampson took Nadya Tichman's hand, and half-dragged her to center stage for a joint bow. MTT programmed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony for the second half of the concert, and it turned out to be my third encounter of the day with the work. In the afternoon, there was a preview screening of "Taking Sides," Istvan Szabo's film version of Ronald Harwood's play about the denazification investigation of Wilhelm Furtwangler. Snippets of the Beethoven Fifth run through the film, some from Furtwangler recordings, but for the opening scene, in "an unprecedented attempt to re-create a historical musical event" (says the press release). To show a concert in the old Berlin Philharmonic Hall in 1943, interrupted by an Allied air raid, the scene has Daniel Barenboim's Berlin Staatskapelle impersonate the Philharmonic (there may be an interesting story behind the real Philharmonic's refusal to participate), with Stellan Skarsgard, who plays Furtwangler, waving his arms. Meanwhile, on the soundtrack, there is Barenboim "reproducing Furtwangler's tempi and nuances, directing the orchestra... with headphones in order to replicate as far as reasonably possible for the digital age, the unique sound and dramatic intensity of Furtwangler's interpretation." My! There is nothing simple about the long-hair music business in Hollywood. How is the movie? Pretty awful. Imagine a film about Furtwangler with the sum total of the Fifth fragments, a bit of Bruckner, a few measures of a Schubert Quintet... and nothing more. The play itself, having taken on a very large and complex topic - the dilemma of the artist in a country gone mad: to escape, to stay, to cooperate for self-preservation, for doing good, etc. - suffered from purple, overheated, improbable prose, from mixing reality and fantasy badly. Now, although Szabo is an outstanding director, the film was doomed from the start because of the casting. The role of the out-of-control, scenery-chewing Army major in charge of the investigation went to Harvey Keitel, who amplified and exaggerated the already louder-than-life character, crossing the sound barrier and the threshold of viewer pain. Barenboim's dubbing was all for naught. As for the San Francisco Symphony's continued presentation of singers once more at home across Grove Street, in the War Memorial, Hampson will be succeeded in Davies Hall next week by Laura Claycomb in Mahler's Fourth Symphony, and by Monica Groop, Matthew Polenzani and Samuel Ramey in Berlioz's "Romeo and Juliet," Oct. 8-11. MTT will conduct both series. The program will Hampson runs through Sunday, and will be broadcast on KDFC-FM (www2.kdfc.com) at 8 p.m. PDT, Sept. 30. Janos Gereben/SF www.sfcv.org [log in to unmask]