Music Reviews : Violinist Gil Shaham in Unscheduled Local Debut

Serving as a pinch-hitter, 18-year-old violinist Gil Shaham made his West Coast debut Saturday at Pepperdine University in the final program of this summer’s Strawberry Creek Festival.

Shaham has performed on short notice before, most notably substituting for an ailing Itzhak Perlman in London earlier this year. This time the Dorothy DeLay student replaced Mark Peskanov, who is reportedly due for finger surgery. Stepping out for his initial bow, Shaham seemed ill-at-ease, but once he began playing, he exhibited remarkable confidence and poise, and delivered a stunningly clean account of the Mendelssohn Concerto.

He produced a pure, radiant sound, suave in softer passages, bold and soaring in the louder ones. He may need a few years to develop his own interpretive style--the cadenza, for instance, was accurate but sterile-sounding--but he nonetheless infused his playing with considerable drama.

Four curtain calls elicited an encore, Svendsen’s Romance, Opus 26, to which the young virtuoso brought artful phrasing and sure-footed control. Providing solid support were the members of the Festival Orchestra, conducted by Yehuda Gilad, although occasionally one heard wayward intonation from the winds.

In two orchestral pieces, Gilad showed a capacity for coaxing energized, propulsive music-making from his ensemble. He made a strong case for Dvorak’s Sixth Symphony, bringing out telling details and defining key points, all the while maintaining an uninterrupted musical flow. Fast passages did find string players scrambling noticeably on occasion, but on the whole Gilad succeeded in keeping this a balanced, rhythmically tight reading.

The orchestra opened the program with a liquid, transparent account of the “Sigfried Idyll,” weaving continuous lyrical threads into Wagner’s contrapuntal tapestry.