Music Reviews : Mehli Mehta Leads American Youth Symphony

The American Youth Symphony opened its 1991-92 concert season with one of its founding conductor’s longtime specialties: Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony.

That conductor is, of course, Mehli Mehta--now in his 26th season with the orchestra--who led the work with characteristic discipline and aplomb.

The concert, at Ambassador Auditorium Sunday evening and scheduled for repeat at Royce Hall this Sunday, also featured Soviet pianist Irina Smorodinova in Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto.

To say that she’s an excitable pianist would put it mildly. She pounded out clusters of chords and muscular passagework, offered brittle accents, impetuous melodicism and quick expression. Hers was a performance of unflinching brashness and bravura and rapturousness.

Unfortunately, her aggressive approach usually left the music even heavier than it already is--textures were incomprehensibly thick and rhythms sluggish. Her technique proved inconsistently controlled. Mehta and orchestra accompanied weightily, overbalancing the pianist often, and not always following her flights of fancy.

The 83-year-old conductor concluded the concert with a truly distinguished and spirited reading of the Tchaikovsky, the orchestra revealing a keenly balanced and taut ensemble, and ready responsiveness to Mehta’s expressive cues.

Mehta’s interpretation seems to have broadened over the years, and the outer movements in particular effectively combined spaciousness with intensity, unhurried, shapely phrasing with rhythmic exactitude.

It was also a reading brimming with detail, like his gracious highlighting of an often overlooked woodwind hymn in the first movement, or his close attention to dynamics in the fate motive.

The slick vulgarities of Shostakovich’s “Festival” Overture served as curtain raiser, in a properly raucous and nimble account.