Music Review : Ashkenazy Conducts Philharmonic at Music Center

We seem to be in the midst of a boom in pre-atonal Schoenberg, something apparent in the Los Angeles Philharmonic programming this season. Andre Previn returns in February for the monumental “Gurrelieder,” while this weekend at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Vladimir Ashkenazy matched “Pelleas und Melisande” with some Sibelius.

Completed in 1903, Schoenberg’s “Pelleas und Melisande” is a long tone poem, almost obsessive in its programmatic depiction of Maeterlinck’s play. It is generous in sentiment and overwhelming in orchestral display, and as fascinating in its audible roots as in its clear auguries of things to come.

For all of that, it inspired more respect than affection Friday, in the first of two rare live performances.

“Pelleas und Melisande” may be a piece of surging, portentous storytelling, but it is also a matter of articulated structure and dense instrumental polyphony. Ashkenazy did well by the big themes and gave clear cyclical definition to the form.

But the textures he drew from the Philharmonic were impenetrable. Clarity is admittedly a relative concept in Schoenberg’s morass of virulently multiplying motives, but Ashkenazy seemed to latch onto one main theme at a time, and leave the rest of the score an amorphous muttering.

Balances were tilted in favor of the winds throughout. Even the central ecstasies sounded more clotted than rapturous. Only in the final passages of death and doom did the sound and fury take on real significance.

After intermission, Ashkenazy began the Sibelius portion of the sololess program with the “Valse triste,” from the same year as “Pelleas und Melisande.” His account proved surprisingly lithe, with the emphasis more on the waltz than on the sadness and all the more affective thus.

Working from memory in Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony, Ashkenazy produced peaks of grandeur at the end of the opening movement and in the finale, and an affectionate Andante. But the calculated understatement of the beginning sounded simply inarticulate and disinterested, and the abrupt final chords fizzled badly.

The Philharmonic efforts sounded more workmanlike than inspired or inspiring, despite noble individual and sectional solos in all works. The wind-dominated balances persisted in the Sibelius, and the violins added a sad measure of imprecision to the Scherzo scamperings.