Music Reviews : Ashkenazy Conducts Royal Philharmonic in Pasadena

Though its appearance on a series titled “Great Orchestras of the World” may be arguable, the concert by the touring Royal Philharmonic in Pasadena Civic Auditorium this week turned out a pleasant occasion, nonetheless.

Any disappointments in the performance of the 43-year-old British orchestra, an accomplished symphonic band by any measurement, came in the conducting of its music director, Vladimir Ashkenazy. Otherwise, the playing of a program comprising Richard Strauss’ “Don Juan,” Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder” and Brahms’ First Symphony, emerged competent and respectable Thursday night.

But not enlightened or inspired. Ashkenazy remains a problematic conductor, one whose podium style looks frenzied, yet who earns only variable success in his attempts at imprinting original ideas on an orchestra.

In an evening of undistinctive music making, least satisfactory was Ashkenazy’s Brahms First, which lacked tension in the opening movement and, subsequently, catharsis in the finale.

In reconsidering the unfolding Angst of the first movement, the conductor seemed to have decided that fragmentation--looking at each musical event as it arrived--made sense as an interpretive device. The immediate result was slackness in both rhythm and thought.

When, after two nicely realized and paced inner movements, the brooding introduction to the finale arrived, its conflicts sounded, not like a climax of irresolution, as it can, but like yet another moody interlude between large events.

The playing of the (in this work) 80-member orchestra was efficient enough--ignoring a too-predominant solo horn and over-reediness in the principal clarinet--but lacked any audible motivation.

The Scottish mezzo-soprano, Christine Cairns, remembered from two important Music Center appearances in recent seasons, took the solo duties in Mahler’s most affecting song-cycle.

Despite Cairns’ handsome, clear-eyed and rich-voiced singing, this remained a no-hanky performance. The singer delivered the words carefully, but with minimal coloration of their meanings. Ashkenazy enforced sensible tempo-schemes, though he allowed the orchestra to grow too loud in many moments--something he does often, with or without soloist--and let the Mahlerian rhetoric emerge. But, again, as in Brahms, there was little tension, less release.

Clarity and loudness and not much transparency characterized Ashkenazy’s reading of “Don Juan,” through which he and the orchestra moved quickly, but without any sense of musical story-telling. The components were in place, but no wonder, certainly no magic, in their ordering.