MUSIC REVIEW : Andre Previn: From Berlioz to Brahms

Over the holidays, observers of the musical scene witnessed the Los Angeles Philharmonic in apparently joyous reunions with one of its former music directors, Zubin Mehta. Ending last week, that series of concerts looked suspiciously like an overdue reconciliation between old friends.

A different kind of reunion took place Thursday night, when Philharmonic subscribers at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Music Center greeted another former music director, Andre Previn, who led the first of four performances--the third takes place at the Orange County Performing Arts Center tonight--of a Berlioz-Tippett-Brahms program. Previn returns to the Pavilion for a second week on Thursday.

The first agenda, characteristically subtle in its relationships, might have been dominated by Previn’s intriguing rethinking of Brahms’ most complex and challenging orchestral essay, the Fourth Symphony, which ended the evening.

Instead, it achieved its peak-- climaxed would be too strong a verb--in the more mysterious subtexts of Sir Michael Tippett’s 23-year-old Triple Concerto.

This lengthy piece for violin, viola, cello and orchestra may be one of Sir Michael’s most probing and lyrical, if superficially abstruse, works; its affects are of the thoughtful, low-key variety. Pervasively sad and reflective, even in its more lively moments, it ought to provide a quiet center in an energetic, ebullient program.

When placed between Berlioz’s airy “Beatrice et Benedict” Overture and Brahms’ lofty Fourth Symphony, Tippett’s forbiddingly polytonal yet highly attractive Triple Concerto seems even more distracted than it may be. In this context, it did not make its points as strongly as it might have, surrounded differently.

Still, Previn led his listeners through the work’s many mazes with assurance, convincing in all moments that his view of its emotional scenario reflects the composer’s best rhetoric. The virtuosic soloists, all three of whom performed with apparent effortlessness and a real and projected sense of the composer’s style, were violinist Elizabeth Baker, violist John Hayhurst and cellist Barry Gold, Philharmonic veterans all.

The 62-year-old conductor did not achieve as much in his architectonically fragmented, rhythmically uncompelling run-through of Brahms’ E-minor Symphony, wherein the Philharmonic players performed scrappily in the opening movement, then spottily after that.

At the beginning, the “Beatrice et Benedict” excerpt showed off the orchestra’s admirable resources of color and wide-ranging dynamics handsomely.

For the second week, the Philharmonic’s cough-drop dispensers held no comfort--and no Hall’s--for patrons in need of such.

(Orange County Edition) Andre Previn will conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Berlioz’s “Overture to Beatrice and Benedict”; Brahms’ Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98, and Sir Michael Tippett’s Triple Concerto, tonight at 8 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tickets: $15 to $42. Sponsored by the Orange County Philharmonic Society. Information: (714) 646-6277.