MUSIC REVIEW : Concertgebouw Shines in Eccentric Farewell Program

Orchestral brilliance, in varied contexts, seemed the connecting factor in the Royal Concertgebouw program Sunday evening at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. For the third and final concert of their local visit, Riccardo Chailly and the Dutch orchestra offered a compellingly eccentric agenda.

The glowering Third Symphony by Prokofiev is certainly an unusual vehicle for orchestral display, but also certainly an effective one in its dark fantasies and Shostakovian turbulence. It gave the Concertgebouw woodwinds--an idiosyncratic contingent in both tone color, featuring wood flutes, and intonation--ample opportunity for pertinent impact, focused by Chailly into a remorselessly dour and controlled expression of downbeat bravura.

At the other end of the emotional spectrum was Johan Wagenaar’s Overture to “The Taming of the Shrew,” which could easily have been called “Petruchio’s Merry Pranks” for its indebtedness to Strauss in spirit and orchestration. Chailly and his orchestra gave it a lithe, sparkling performance.

Chailly made few nods to period practice in Beethoven’s First Symphony, keeping most of the Concertgebouw strings on stage. He kept the textures cherishably clean, however, and ensemble taut in his swift, serious account.

The unassertive strings were often buried by their more boisterous wind colleagues in the big pieces, but they had their own chance to shine in encore, with a silken, sophisticated glide through one of Dvorak’s Hungarian Dance arrangements. Then practically every section of the band got to show their sassy side in Shostakovich’s “Tahiti Trot,” a setting of “Tea for Two.”