MUSIC REVIEW : Previn Opens Winter Season With a Bang

Say this for Andre Previn: He did not open the winter season of the Los Angeles Philharmonic with a whimper.

He opened it, Thursday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, with a bang. Make that lots of bangs.

He also opened it with a roar and a soar and a rumble and a thud and a ripple and a riff and a crash and a gush and a rush and a fanfare and a sigh and a whisper and a shimmer and a flourish.

He opened it, furthermore, with a clap of thunder and a multiple thonk of cowbells.

All that puts it mildly, and this wasn’t exactly a mild program. For what may turn out to be his final inaugural engagement at the Music Center, our former music director chose to think very big.

At the same time, he chose to think long, and to think convoluted. Most important, perhaps, he chose to think ultra--even hyper --romantic.

Previn selected only two works for this potentially festive occasion: Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, completed in 1909, and Richard Strauss’ “Eine Alpensinfonie,” a product of 1914. In vastly different ways, each documents the final gasps of a lush, popular idiom declining--perhaps decaying-- in extremis .

By 1914, Stravinsky had already shocked a nostalgic world into quasi-submission with the primitive vigors of “Le Sacre du Printemps.” Schoenberg had already begun his sonic revolution with the compressed rigors of the “Kammersymphonie” and “Funf Orchesterstucke.”

Meanwhile, Rachmaninoff and Strauss were blithely cranking out gigantic pleasantries equipped with pretty tunes and decorated with happy harmonies. For these composers there was no tomorrow. Yesterday was expandable, not expendable.

Rachmaninoff’s keyboard showpiece is a sprawling example of brooding sentiment fused with sensuous lyricism, set forth in the spirit of heroic bravura. Strauss’ tone poem is an endless, overblown, magnificently orchestrated indulgence that virtually bludgeons an audience into submission.

Previn and his accomplices made the most of both challenges. They gave us inspired demonstrations of symphonic decadence.

In the Rachmaninoff, before intermission, Previn provided an extraordinarily precise yet flexible, solid yet lucid orchestral framework for his soloist, Horacio Gutierrez. The pianist, who had brought rare distinction to the same composer’s “Paganini” Rhapsody at the opening of the San Diego Symphony season last week, performed here with comparable grandeur and sensitivity.

He rose to the aggressive climaxes with ample strength but never distorted, never lost control. He mastered the pyrotechnical hurdles with nonchalant brilliance. He ennobled the introspective passages with poetic restraint. Somehow, he made it all sound natural, easy.

In the Alpine travelogue that followed intermission, Previn threw caution to the wind machine. He didn’t wallow in the emotional excesses that used to mark--not mar--Zubin Mehta’s performances of this gargantuan exercise. Previn leaves the perspiring to Strauss.

That hardly means, however, that the conductor slights the inherent expressive appeal. It only means that he maintains a sense of proportion and relative restraint, whatever the distraction.

He still savors color contrasts, paints on a vast dynamic scale, and points out interesting details as he traverses the landscape. In the process, he insists on keeping the beginning, the middle and the end in telling focus.

Previn refuses to be sidetracked by Strauss’ penchant for progressive detours, melodic afterthoughts and premature harmonic ejaculations. He waits for the ultimate, bona-fide climaxes, sustaining tension to the last possible instant.

The Philharmonic played for him with staggering breadth, with astonishing precision and dazzling virtuosity. If we must explore such dangerously treacly territory, let all our camping trips be like this.