MUSIC REVIEW : Soviets Blow Down the House

There is no confusing the U.S.S.R. State Symphony--which music director Yevgeny Svetlanov brought Tuesday to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for the first of two Music Center concerts--with the Leningrad Philharmonic, heard in the same venue earlier this season. If the Leningraders are aristocrats with muscle, the Moscow-based State Symphony might be likened to muscle-bound blue-collar workers.

Little concerned with sonic refinement or interpretive subtleties, they’ll give you the big noise when it’s called for--and when it isn’t, to judge by their delivery Tuesday of a Russian program.

Svetlanov, who has this cute little red plastic electric fan on his music stand, never works up sufficient sweat to need it. His motions are minimal, sometimes non-existent--as in the overture to Glinka’s “Russlan and Ludmilla,” which his charges may know by heart but which was played too fast to allow for meaningful or accurate articulation of the woodwind solos.

The strings were what counted, and if they delivered their notes with more scream than sheen, they delivered them honestly.

Prokofiev’s Seventh Symphony, once reviled as the composer’s ultimate capitulation to know-nothing authority, has with time lost its aura of simplistic prettiness. In such a clear-eyed, propulsive reading as Svetlanov’s, there is strength--even a hint of menace--to match its wistful tunefulness.

The orchestra responded with skill and considerable dynamic subtlety. But ensemble sound was often harsh and diffuse: loud but cramped, with every instrument--save the blasting timpani--employing maximum vibrato, in the old, characterful Russian style that is fast fading in the face of international sonic homogenization.

The remainder of the program was devoted to the agonies, ecstasies and fantasies of Alexander Scriabin’s awesomely awful Franck-and-Wagner obsessed Third Symphony, “The Divine Poem.”

One couldn’t help noticing that whatever the noise level provided by the huge brass and percussion section during this 45-minute orgy of self-indulgence, the solo oboe could still be heard: an immense squawk, as if somehow produced by forcing air between a pair of slapped-together two-by-fours.

While it would be foolish for this pummeled correspondent to attempt an assessment of the finer points of Svetlanov’s reading, it did seem that Scriabin’s self-described “orgasmic surges” were rather more like explosions, sometimes premature and far too frequent to simulate reality.