Were it not for the San Francisco Opera Center, the San Francisco Symphony tonight would have been up the creek without... soloists. Scheduled for the Faure Requiem, Barbara Bonney took ill, and former Adler fellow Nicolle Foland stood in. Then, before the concert, Gabriel Souvanen, a Swedish baritone about to make his debut here, said that he cannot go on, and once again, the call went out to the Opera, across the street. Brad Alexander, a super-talented young singer, also a Merola/Adler veteran, to the rescue. Unfortunately, replacements stopped there, and the concert went on with the originally scheduled conductor. I don't know if it's a coincidence, but wherever and whenever (in many lands, through decades), I hear Vladimir Ashkenazy conduct, I rue the day - long, long ago - when this exceptional pianist decided to start waving the baton. Perhaps if I am not in the audience, he justifies his long and apparently successful career, but what I have always heard, and what came through painfully tonight, is somebody adequate and mediocre, *playing* music, not singing it, not riding its crest, giving it shape and meaning. Such missing qualities were in great demand tonight, in an all-French repertoire of mostly "pleasant music." Certainly, the first half of the concert was soporific to the max, 45 minutes of unison, endless string passages. Simon Rattle might have enlivened the evening, but none of his magic was in evidence. "Psyche" is a mellow retread of whatever Cesar Franck left out of his Symphony in D (and some restatements of what's in that work already), led by Ashkenazy in a warm, heartfelt, slack-jawed fashion. The last movement ended well, with some sign of life at long last, but it was too little, too late. The Symphony's marvelous string sections worked hard, but there was no shape or edge to what they were playing. Honegger's 1941 Second Symphony has more content than "Pscyhe," but you'd never know that in the interpretation heard tonight in Davies Hall. Instead of being lyrical, the Allegro was soothing, as if heard in an elevator, but even more boring. Once again, the conclusion of the work showed some improvement in being "music-like," but the Vivace was excessively non troppo, torporously. And so we came to better music, Faure's gorgeous Requiem, with Vance George's great SFS Chorus at Ashkenazy's disposal. How good is this chorus? So good that it succeeded without - no, in spite of - the conductor. Men and women mixed in ever section, in a configuration I have not seen here before, the chorus sang serenely and beautifully, while the whole work remained somewhat shapeless, not as much as the Franck and Honegger, but similarly. The music lingered, instead of moving forward; lines were not sustained and completed under the conductor's baton. The two young, talented substitutes did the job, but both visually and audibly tense and careful, instead of celebrating the music as they both could and would, given the right kind of leadership. Folland's single aria was just adequate, Alexander's two contributions well sung, but too circumpect, almost meek, not so much reflecting the text as lacking vitality (of which the singer, heard in other performances, has plenty). Janos Gereben/SF www.sfcv.org [log in to unmask]