MUSIC REVIEWS : BELGIAN ORCHESTRA AT ROYCE HALL

A 17-year-old orchestra and a 22-year-old pianist paid a visit to UCLA’s Royce Hall Thursday evening. And a welcome visit it was.

The Liege Philharmonic of Belgium, making its first North American tour, proved to be a first-class ensemble. In music of the late Romantic period, the group played with crisp attacks, fine balances and rhythmic solidity.

In Franck’s D-minor Symphony, a work whose longueurs can grow tiresome, the Belgian musicians showed that close attention to dramatic detail pays off.

Conductor Pierre Bartholomee, who has led the group since 1977, communicates clearly and directly, and his musicians gave him dynamic and interpretive unanimity. His motions tend to be stiff but that does not prevent him from eliciting a luscious legato line or a delicate pianissimo from his orchestra. And the fortissimos, charged up by a powerful brass section, proved nothing less than thrilling.

Some faulty wind intonation did crop up during the symphony, but otherwise Bartholomee’s troops gave him meticulous accuracy. Indeed, the conductor seems to have chosen a paradigmatic performance over a less conventional but potentially more distinctive one.

The piano soloist in Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto, unlike the others on stage, is a native Californian. Gustavo Romero, a student at the Juilliard School, displayed superior precision and an extraordinary dynamic range. One cannot claim that Romero brought any striking insight to the work or traversed any new interpretive ground. But time is in his favor, and with his technique and control, this pianist may go very far.

The orchestra began the program with Smetana’s “The Moldau,” in a reading that maintained the same technical standards as elsewhere. But inflexible tempos and over-controlled phrasing begat a sterile predictability.

As an encore the group zestfully delivered Glinka’s “Russlan and Ludmilla” Overture.