MUSIC REVIEW : Stucky, Brahms Occupy Philharmonic Week

In the performed arts, substance and seriousness are not enough, as listeners at the Thursday night subscription concert by the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Music Center found out, again.

With Debussy’s languid but demanding “Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune” as the curtain-raiser, two large-scale works--contrasting concertos, actually--dominated Andre Previn’s latest Philharmonic program (repeated Friday night and Sunday afternoon). Before intermission, the subscribers heard the local premiere of Steven Stucky’s recent Concerto for Orchestra; after, Brahms’ Second Piano Concerto, with Horacio Gutierrez the soloist.

Previn and Gutierrez appear to be sensitive and equal musical partners, and their joint efforts on behalf of Brahms’ massive B-flat Concerto proved admirable in many ways. But this performance never caught fire.

Not surprisingly, the Cuban-born musician showed all the musical and technical wherewithal for this challenge; his comprehensive technique easily encompassed all the hurdles, complexities and knotty passages in the huge canvas. Yet, his reading emerged uninspired, and lacked any compelling sense of motion.

Gutierrez certainly surveyed the lyric moments thoroughly and with loving hands; a veteran listener felt he was hearing certain passages clearly for the first time. And together, pianist and conductor, aided most carefully by the orchestra, probed and caressed every little part of Brahms’ big score.

But no amount of collegiality seemed able to get this performance off the ground. It moved, if not slowly, then in stately dignity, from beginning to end. And the lack of fire cannot be blamed on the composer.

Stucky’s Concerto for Orchestra turned out to be colorful but undramatic, short-seeming but actually 28 minutes in length. Something Oriental--nothing overt or analyzable--flavors its three contrasting movements. In his fascinating program note, the 39-year-old composer acknowledges that his method of organizing this piece created compositional modules rather than a genuine continuity. That is both the charm and the weakness of the piece.

Fascinating sounds from a number of inner orchestral ensembles keep the listener engaged, and the piece ends before one’s interest wanes. But any sense of arrival, or of direction or climax, seems never to appear. At the final plop, one feels only that the wandering is over--not completed.

What makes the work a concerto is that it is showy, outgoing, concerned with display, and that it exists, as the astrologists say, “above the horizon.” Also, it never rests, or seems to stop strutting its stuff. Tonality and atonality co-habitate its space comfortably; Stucky’s musical language emerges attractive, if not always pretty, yet he is clearly capable of creating feelings of Angst, frustration and conflict through purely tonal means.

The orchestra, under Previn’s confident guidance, gave an interested and thoroughgoing reading. Oddly, the Thursday night audience, which usually makes up its mind quickly about a new work, responded only tepidly to this one.

Debussy’s familiar Prelude opened the program appropriately, in a lush, rich and immaculate rendering which showed the Philharmonic at its most balanced.