Music Review - Mozart, Rachmaninoff Program at Music Center

The virtue of contrast as an all-sustaining program principle got a severe test Thursday evening at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Andre Previn and the Los Angeles Philharmonic paired glossy Technicolor romanticism with a sort of flat brown classicism.

Not, of course, that anyone intended anything quite so drab with Mozart’s Violin Concerto in D, K. 218. There was concertmaster Sidney Weiss giving a warm, solid, singing account of the solo part. There was Previn, encouraging brio and balance, and there was the suitably down-sized Philharmonic contingent, playing blithely if somewhat thickly.

But it never quite meshed into a unified--let alone compelling--statement. In each movement there were notable divergences between Weiss and the band, and the fitfulness of the finale seemed more a matter of befuddlement than spontaneity or whimsy.

Weiss brought a self-effacing sincerity and more than ample technical resources to the task. He challenged himself with a major, stylistically incongruous cadenza for the first movement, reduced the passage work to etude routine and spun out a wonderfully connected, genteel cantabile in the middle movement.

The faceless pallor of the Mozart effort seemed more pronounced after intermission, when Previn and the full orchestra returned with Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony.

Here was a performance with immediacy and an unanswerable rightness to it--vast and vivid, yet firmly focused. Previn takes his Rachmaninoff uncut, and almost convinces us that past impressions of redundant sprawl in the work are the product of interpretive compromises.

In allowing Rachmaninoff his full say, Previn reveals the sure if idiosyncratic sense of proportion under the bombast and sentiment. He also provides an enhancing context for the sudden emotional shifts, suggesting that all the sound and fury signifies much.

The Philharmonic responded heroically. The playing was cohesive and burnished throughout the orchestra, attentive to Previn’s caressive phrasing and well-balanced other than in the finale, where the strings were submerged.

The accomplishment was greeted by an apparently almost-unanimous standing ovation from the large crowd.