MUSIC REVIEW : Ashkenazy Returns to Podium

Vladimir Ashkenazy is a wonderful pianist. We have known that since his debut here in 1967. He is also a somewhat problematic conductor. We have known that since 1984.

One mustn’t question his musicianship, his energy or his expressive flair. These special qualities remain constant. Something of the impact tends to get lost, however, in the translation from keyboard to podium.

Ashkenazy isn’t the first artist to encounter difficulties when trying to mix media. Daniel Barenboim, another splendid pianist, may be doing very well with the baton, but a few brave iconoclasts still dare to wish that Mstislav Rostropovich had stuck with the cello. At worst, Ashkenazy is the best conductor of his genre since Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

Thursday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, he led the eager and willing Los Angeles Philharmonic in some crude Shostakovich, which is fine, and in some crude Beethoven, which isn’t.

Two weeks ago, Andre Previn gave us a thoughtful performance of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony. Last week, Esa-Pekka Salonen offered a rather frenzied Fourth. Now, courtesy of Ashkenazy, we have heard a raucous and overwrought Seventh.

It began ponderously, continued explosively, detoured fussily and ended hysterically. The inherent excitement could not be denied, but it was excitement achieved through vulgarity. As such, it was excitement that obscured Beethoven’s nobility and majesty.

When it came to Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony (1939), Ashkenazy adopted similar textures, a related theatrical stance and a comparable dynamic scale. He made the strings dig deep, the brasses blare and the timpani pound. He strove for guts and grandeur. Here, the rhetorical scheme made better sense.

He used it to sustain tension throughout the brooding episodic sprawl of the largo. He accented the macabre outbursts of the allegro movement with apparent glee and brought down the house with the circus banalities of the presto finale.

He couldn’t make a coherent entity of these three hyper-disparate sections. But Shostakovich can take most of the blame for that.

In any case, this was a vibrant interpretation of a complex work. Responding sensitively to the conductor’s restless right hand (and lazy left), the Philharmonic played as if lives were at stake.

The orchestra, incidentally, hadn’t seen this symphony since 1980, when it was revived by Myung-Whun Chung. The only Philharmonic performance prior to that had been conducted by Eugene Ormandy in the distant days of 1947.