MUSIC REVIEW : Previn Leads the Philharmonic in a Lightweight Finale

The so-called winter season of the Los Angeles Philharmonic ended this year with a bang and a whimper. Neither, alas, turned out to be particularly interesting.

Andre Previn played the final program at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion polite and safe. For better or worse, that seems to have been his style.

On Thursday, the bang--make that bangs, plural--came in the premiere of John Harbison’s Concerto for Double Brass Choir, a local commission. The whimpers surfaced in Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony, which brought the evening as well as our prime orchestral series to an inconsequential close.

“I had long dreamed of a piece beautiful but dumb,” Harbison wrote in his rather startling program note, “with nothing much in its head but sound. I don’t know whether this is it, but it is close.”

Beautiful but dumb. On first hearing, the innocent listener might find it difficult to embrace either description.

Although Harbison, born in 1938, is no dizzy firebrand of the avant-garde, he hardly shies from what the fossils in the audience would call dissonance. The bold chordal blocks that the overworked brass throw at the underworked orchestra in this concerto enforce a healthy degree of ear-stretching, even for the jaded sensibilities of the ‘90s.

This certainly is a rugged and raucous bravura exercise. Call it eminently reasonable.

Can we call it beautiful? That subjective question must languish in the mind of the recipient.

Dumbness is another matter. Harbison is a very crafty composer. Although his latest effort may not brim with profound ideas, it seems brightly structured, knowing in its manipulation of contrasting forces, sophisticated in its application of color and stress.

The chorale rumblings invoke a festive antiquity. The fine tuba solo at the end of the second movement comes close to a lugubrious jeu d’esprit . None of this sounds dumb. It just sounds a little dull.

Previn presided over a clean, propulsive performance that lasted two minutes longer that the 19 prescribed by Harbison. The justly celebrated Philharmonic brass tootled con brio.

The former music-director opened the program with a properly splashy account of Dvorak’s “Carnival” Overture. By a similar token, he brought a nice aura of calm and clarity to the “New World” Symphony.

Nevertheless, he couldn’t negate the lingering suspicion that Dvorak’s pleasant banalities are better served these days amid the casual indulgences of Hollywood Bowl. Nor, alas, could Previn coax consistently reliable intonation from an orchestra that has endured an exceptionally long, hard and vicissitudinous season.