SEVERAL SIDES OF CONDUCTOR ASHKENAZY

One of the names that comes up with increasing frequency when conductors are mentioned these days is that of Vladimir Ashkenazy. Yes, the pianist .

Actually, he and his recording company, Decca (London in this country), increasingly see him as a hyphenate: pianist-conductor. At a time when there is a shortage of star power among conductors, a star pianist like Ashkenazy becomes an increasingly attractive proposition leading an orchestra rather than merely being accompanied by one.

The first inkling of Ashkenazy’s wider ambitions came with the initiation five years ago, when he was 43 years old, of the series of Mozart piano concertos in which he served as both soloist and conductor, no longer a rarity in this music.

Still, from the first there was not only the expected agreement between soloist and conductor but also a higher than usual regard for orchestral niceties considering the circumstances. The subtlety of the woodwind playing of itself as well as in combination with the piano is far removed here from the blunt, often tepid orchestral work one finds in the pioneering but in all respects superseded efforts of the late Geza Anda, recorded during the 1960s by Deutsche Grammophon.

Granted, Ashkenazy’s London Philharmonia Orchestra is a more accomplished and sensitive ensemble than was Anda’s Salzburg Mozarteum group. Still, Anda had neither the conductor’s skill nor a specific kind of communicative gift required to draw more than routine work from his players. He was, after all, drawing little more than routine pianism from himself.

Some impressive large-orchestra stuff--Sibelius and Rachmaninoff, strictly baton-conducted, of course--followed the Ashkenazy Mozart. Then there were Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, solid accomplishments both, neither necessarily showing a “point of view” beyond the desire to make clean, forceful music.

The latest Ashkenazy-as-conductor recordings have him directing the Philharmonia Orchestra again, this time in a big-boned, alert reading of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony (London 411 941-1). The disc further contains a grandly scaled, menacing reading of Beethoven’s “Egmont” Overture and a less persuasive account of the “Coriolan” Overture, music which, with its jarring shifts of mood and emphasis, has brought to grief many a more experienced baton-wielder.

That Ashkenazy remains a neophyte conductor is tellingly evidenced in Dvorak’s Cello Concerto (London 410 144-1). The orchestra is once more the Philharmonia; the soloist is Lynn Harrell.

Ashkenazy handles the opening pages of the introduction confidently, but with the deceleration and lessening of tension leading up to the entry of the solo horn, the music comes close to stopping dead in its tracks.

Subsequently, one can hear the gears grinding to get the orchestra up to tempo again, with a flowing line not returning until Harrell’s commanding entry.

And so it goes for the duration. The music has shape and coherence when the soloist is on the scene. When he is not, one senses measure-by-measure conducting (a learning process), the inability to see extended sections, to say nothing of movements, as entities.

The cellist is clearly unfazed by his colleague’s inconsistencies. Harrell’s performance is magnificent: gorgeous in tone, broadly lyrical yet full of rhythmic verve.

That accompanying is the most elusive of the conducting arts is illustrated by the example of Zubin Mehta’s latest encounter with the five piano concertos of Beethoven (London 411 899-1). The soloist is a gentleman named Ashkenazy.

Ashkenazy has already made a highly lauded recording of this music, with Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony, also for London. He is more expansive and relaxed in the newer set, more intent on detail than before, when he assumed a measure of Solti’s characteristic nervous intensity.

Alas, the pianist’s mellow mastery elicits lax, flaccid leadership from Mehta, and the Vienna Philharmonic seems barely to be exerting itself, whereas the same ensemble played with such panache for Karl Boehm and Eugen Jochum in their Beethoven concerto collaboration with pianist Maurizio Pollini for Deutsche Grammophon.

Ashkenazy, Solti and the London Philharmonic Orchestra a few years ago gave us a dazzling recording of Bartok’s Second and Third Piano Concertos. Now, the same team completes the set with the composer’s First Concerto (London 410 108-1).

Here, we experience not only the percussive tumult and rhythmic ferocity inherent in the music but as well its countless felicities of dynamics and orchestration. The fact that the composer came by his highly expressive kind of noise via the keenest insight into the workings of the piano and the wind instruments is strikingly projected by the present performers.

The concerto is coupled with a hair-raising and flawlessly clear account of one of Bartok’s late masterpieces, the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, wherein Ashkenazy is joined by his 22-year-old pianist son, Vovka, and percussionists David Corkhill and Andrew Smith.