MUSIC REVIEW : Soviet Cellist Gutman in Philharmonic Debut

Before the current illness of composer/conductor Oliver Knussen intervened, the Los Angeles Philharmonic program at the Music Center this week contained three first performances as well as major works by Shostakovich and Stravinsky.

In Thursday night’s event at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, with assistant conductor Heiichiro Ohyama substituting for the indisposed British musician, Shostakovich (the Second Cello Concerto) and Stravinsky (“Firebird” Suite) remained. But the premieres still await exposure.

Ohyama led the first of three performances of this agenda, now including Mussorgsky’s Prelude to “Khovanshchina” and Elliott Carter’s Elegy (the scheduled premieres had been by Knussen and Carter). The auditorium was not full, but those who attended expressed approbation, at least at the ends of the larger pieces.

Indeed, the Philharmonic played strongly, and with a full palette of dynamics. It sounded better, in fact, than Ohyama’s sometimes tentative gestures looked.

After a timid run-through of the Mussorgsky excerpt, the 41-year-old violist/conductor gave Natasha Gutman solid and informed support in the depressed and depressing rhetoric of Shostakovich’s virtuoso lament.

Because the Soviet cellist made all its tricky and complicated passages seem easy, one’s attention could be fully focused on the work’s thoroughgoing sadness. Through even its fast and loud perorations, this basically muted solo piece manages to sap the energy of its performers and auditors.

In her Philharmonic debut, the 47-year-old Gutman produced as wide a range of expressiveness as may be possible in this work, and with a thorough economy of means as well as genuinely imperturbable technique. After the quiet, receding closing bars of the dance-on-the-grave finale, the audience went to the other extreme with noisy approval.

There was poetry as well as noise in the Philharmonic’s polished playing of the “Firebird” excerpts. If Ohyama’s reading offered nothing new or distinctive, it gave full value to the well-known virtues already present in the score. Preceding the Stravinsky suite, the conductor drew lush and motivated playing from the Philharmonic strings in Carter’s 50-year-old Elegy, a relic that reeks charmingly of the 1930s.