MUSIC REVIEW : Ashkenazy Introduces New Previn Concerto at Pavilion

Andre Previn’s 2-year-old piano concerto, which Vladimir Ashkenazy introduced to America at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Thursday, is of the neo-romantic persuasion.

That comes, of course, as no surprise. Our composing music-director is no avant-gardist, and never has been.

The episodic opus in question, is big and splashy. It is accessible and, given the stylistic direction of recent trends, almost fashionable.

It abounds in canny and colorful orchestral effects. It alternates dutifully between lyrical lulls and dramatic fits. It demands lots of complex flourishes from the soloist. It makes a mighty noise at the end.

And it goes nowhere.

For all its craft, the concerto remains a rather pretentious essay in cautious noodling and old-fashioned doodling. It suggests nothing so much as a clever network of deja entendu sound effects. It offers eine kleine Film-musik here, snatches of secondhand Soviet bombast there, patches of wrong-note sentimentality in the middle.

Ashkenazy played the very busy if not very rewarding solos with spiffy authority. Previn and the Los Angeles Philharmonic created an obviously sympathetic orchestral frame. The audience applauded politely.

A good time was had by some.

Saving his concerto for the post-intermission climax, Previn devoted the first half of the program to Richard Strauss’ “Tod und Verklarung” and Debussy’s Three Nocturnes. The Germanic tone poem, a relatively unaccustomed challenge, posed some problems, but the Gallic meanderings brought out the best in the conductor.

The Strauss, which sounded needlessly coarse throughout, lacked the wonted sense of repose at the outset. One searched in vain for hints of otherworldly mystery, and for delicacy of phrasing in the inner voices. When the ultimate, long-delayed crescendo began, Previn seemed in a rush to reach the zonking cadence.

The playing, for the most part, was splendid. The architectural sprawl was nicely contained. But the potentially heroic gesture seemed timid, and the final transfiguration emerged stubbornly prosaic.

Faced with the less specific narrative devices of Debussy, Previn became positively poetic. He really made the orchestra glow in an elegantly blurry--but hardly amorphous--delineation of “Nuages.” He defined the hypnotic appeal of “Fetes” with clarity and muted agitation. With the women of the Master Chorale providing sensuous vocal shimmer, he insinuated wondrous images in “Sirenes.”

This was urgent Debussy. This was Debussy with finesse but without flab.