PREVIN CONDUCTS : A BELATED PREMIERE FOR SHAPERO

Harold Shapero isn’t exactly an enfant terrible . He isn’t even an enfant . Maybe he never was.

While the music world of the 20th Century has supported varying paroxysms of fashionable adventure, he has concentrated on refining impulses of the past. He hasn’t turned his back on serialism, hasn’t even ignored electronic progress. But he has left the storming of avant-garde barriers to others.

“I feel that if my music has some originality, beauty and invention,” he once wrote, “it will be sufficient, whatever the labels applied.” Shapero insists he is “no enemy of the ‘new,’ ” but feels that in much modern music “the excitement of physical sound has masked intellectual, moral and aesthetic chaos.”

One may argue about the degree of originality in his music. The beauty and invention, however, are palpable.

The old-fashioned virtues certainly were palpable Thursday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, where Andre Previn and the Los Angeles Philharmonic introduced Southern California to Shapero’s Symphony for Classical Orchestra. The local premiere, not incidentally, came nearly 40 years after Leonard Bernstein conducted the first performance of the work in Boston.

The Thursday-night audience in Los Angeles is notoriously conservative. It has booed Shostakovich, ridiculed Britten. Last month, having endured a little “Wozzeck,” it walked out--repeat, walked out!--rather than put up with the additional insult of the closing scene of Richard Strauss’ (ultra-romantic) “Capriccio.” The opera was written, after all, in 1942.

The Symphony for Classical Orchestra was written five years ater. Shapero was 27 at the time.

On this occasion, the subscribers somehow managed to overlook the dangerous date of composition. They actually agreed to listen. Mirabile dictu , they loved what they heard. At the end, when Shapero joined Previn on stage for a bow, he got the sort of ovation normally reserved for flashy pianists and fat tenors.

His symphony is, if nothing else, easy to take. Much has been said about how it speaks Beethoven’s language with Stravinsky’s accent. In the cool light of 1986, however, Beethoven’s influence seems stronger than Stravinsky’s.

There are gentle harmonic clashes and some jagged rhythmic edges, to be sure. Nevertheless, the fundamental expressive and structural impulses suggest an ode to the past rather than an exploration of the present.

Shapero reveals himself here as a superb craftsman, an artist totally in control of the grandiose variables at hand. The writing is clever, subtle, elegant. Ultimately, it isn’t affecting in spite of the inherent anachronisms, but because of them.

In 1947, Shapero enjoyed the inspiration, as well as the courage, of his classical convictions.

The opening allegro exudes nervous energy quite different from the heroic frenzy of the finale. The scherzo is a jaunty, wispy bagatelle. Most memorable, however, is the bittersweet, elegiac adagietto, a movement that often invokes the nocturnal ecstasies of Prokofiev.

Previn conducted a performance notable for verve, clarity and transparency. After intermission, he returned with Emanuel Ax for Beethoven’s mighty “Emperor” Concerto. The result was somewhat less successful.

Ax played with ample impetuosity and vigor, with feathery pianissimo inflections, with striking dynamic sensitivity in the great octave scale passages. Unfortunately, he also impeded the flowing rhetoric from time to time with fussy, oddly casual, disjointed phrasing, and he repeatedly encountered accuracy problems.

So, for that matter, did the orchestra.