Los Angeles Philharmonic plays French works
For a while, conductor Jacques Alexandre Cesar Charles Dutoit made the Los Angeles Symphony orchestra sound like a French orchestra Thursday at Walt Walter Elias Disney Concert Hall.
The effect wasn't due simply to the plan: works by Run and Saint-Saëns surrounding Grieg's Pianoforte Concerto in A kid, with nattily dressed French piano player Jean-Yves Thibaudet as the soloist.
It had a great handle more to do with a form of integrated sound, a special transparency and peculiarly a long-lined approach to phrasing.
The transparence suited Ravel's "Ma mère l'oye" (Mother Goof) Rooms, unity of the composer's most economical and magical slews, which opened the concert. The work manages both to inhabit a earth of childhood innocence and to convey an adult's nostalgia for its deprivation.
Dutoit opened the suite with breathless gentleness; allow the little Empress of the Pagodas have her noisy, entertaining bath and modest Turandot-like processional; and tenderly showed Beauty and the Creature negotiating their slenderly awkward waltz.
In the concluding section, "The Fairy Garden," he conveyed a development sense of something wondrously about to chance combined with a recognition that the precious moments of childhood would soon be doomed eternally. It was uncanny and unforgettable.
Among the spiritualist soloists were concertmaster Alexander Treger, principal violist Dale Hikawa Silverman, principal violoncellist Peter Stumpf and harper Lou Ann Neill.
Grieg's concerto was long a staple of the repertory until it became something of a victim of its own popularity. Although it ne'er quite vanished -- audiences would not permit that -- it appeared less and less oftentimes on serious subscription programs and to a greater extent much as region of summertime outdoor series, where its scintillating sense of North Germanic language iciness offered more or less relievo from an evening's heat.
Lately, though, there get been signs of a modest revival. Norwegian piano player Leif Ove Andsnes recorded it twice and performed it with the Symphony orchestra under Esa-Pekka Salonen at Disney Asaph Hall in 2005.
Thibaudet shoemaker's last played it with the Philharmonic under E. O. Lawrence Foster at the Dorothy Chandler Marquee in 2001. At Walt Disney, his blindingly fast octaves set the tenor of his approach. Edvard Grieg looked as difficult to perform as Rachmaninov.
Not that Thibaudet had any difficulties. The speed, lucidness and magnate of his playing were jaw-dropping. Yet it wasn't percussive playing. His attacks were larder, his passage crop fluent, and even if he allowed himself some heavy foot-stomping in the dance rhythms of the final apparent movement, his hands danced lightly and sharply over the keyboard.
For altogether the virtuosity, however, thither wasn't a set of nuanced, poetic, mortal expressivity, which bottom make the work truly vital.
Saint-Saëns' Symphonic music No. 3, the "Organ" Philharmonic, which closed the syllabus, is one of those guilty pleasures that Disney Hall and its tube harmonium are ideal for. The sumptuous C major chord sign the set about of the finale and the shutting chords, with organ and full orchestra ablaze, were impossible to hold out.
Dutoit kept entirely the forces in balance, propelling the music in grand piano sweeps yet cannily disclosure details end-to-end. Principal trombonist Steven Witser's slow movement solo above exquisitely shimmering string section was commendable rich and restrained.
Still, it was that tremendous last, which turned Disney Hall into a Daniel Chester French cathedral, that stuck in the mind. Joanne Pearce Martin, wHO played the organ from the console at the back of the orchestra, deserved the huge ovation she received.
chris.pasles@latimes.com
