Music Reviews : High Spirits in Second Oslo Philharmonic Program

The accomplished, but hardly virtuosic Oslo Philharmonic gave the second of its two Dorothy Chandler Pavilion concerts Tuesday night, and brought high spirits and informed playing to a program of music by Arne Nordheim, Beethoven and Sibelius.

Mariss Jansons, music director of the Norwegian ensemble since 1979, closed this program with a cathartic and detailed performance of Sibelius’ First Symphony, a work worthy of regular revival when given this much loving attention.

Jansons & Comapny achieved a full-blooded, intelligently paced and emotionally resonant reading; instrumentally, it emerged more gritty than lush, but that seemed almost appropriate.

Nordheim’s “Canzona per Orchestra,” one of the ear-opening works that launched the Norwegian composer’s international career in the early ‘60s, retains its bite and relevance at this late date. Tight but expansive in its violent rhetoric, it occupies 11 varied minutes with fragmented, sometimes bitter, eventfulness; the Oslo Philharmonic delivered its expressivity with gripping authority.

There was no letup of interest at the center of this program, when American pianist Misha Dichter joined the ensemble in Beethoven’s C-major Concerto, achieving not only stylishness and heat, but also as many contrasts as the piece actually contains.

For once, Beethoven’s own, brilliantly extensive first-movement cadenza seemed to fit in its niche as the true climax of the movement. And seldom has one heard the Largo given such depth of feeling in tandem with a genuine sense of improvisation.