Dance, Music Reviews : Temirkanov Leads Romantic Program

Individuality seems in short supply among conductors of the middle and younger generations now practicing internationally. But Yuri Temirkanov--born 1938--makes up for all the blandness of his contemporaries.

The musician from the Caucasus, long associated with orchestras in Leningrad (before it became St. Petersburg again), does things his own way, sometimes with superior results, sometimes with surprising slovenliness. At his second week’s appearance as podium guest with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the Music Center, he revealed again many facets of his inconsistency.

In a program of Romantic monuments--Weber’s “Freischutz” Overture, Schumann’s Piano Concerto and Tchaikovsky’s “Manfred” Symphony--Temirkanov drew some wonderfully polished moments from our orchestra alongside coarse and rough instrumentalism quite uncharacteristic of these players.

The problem may be the conductor’s physical gestures--apparently designed to confuse--which veer between the overprecise and the macrokinetic, and seem, in worst moments, to make a guessing game of the players’ jobs. If one were to watch a silent film of Temirkanov’s conducting, there would be no clues in his movements as to the dynamics or motion of the music going on, so contradictory are his visual cues.

The results at the first of four performances, Thursday night, were decidedly mixed, if not exactly worthless. One did, after all, hear this music, through the strange filter of Temirkanov’s sensibilities. Some of it emerged beauteous.

The “Manfred” Symphony, which the conductor had performed here twice, with his own Leningrad Philharmonic in November, 1990, and which provided the climax to this evening, seemed less convincing this time around.

Temirkanov brought the same broad dynamic scale, close attention to myriad musical details and canny pacing, to its sometimes sprawling lengths.

The orchestra played, after too many strident, poorly tuned and roughly balanced moments in the opening movement, carefully and with all its resources in control.

Yet the total seemed to go nowhere, at least not below the surface of the interested listener’s attention, and one came away feeling that the much-maligned piece perhaps deserves its neglect.

At the beginning, in the “Freischutz” Overture, there were handsome contributions from horns and solo clarinet, but otherwise an orchestral performance compromised by inexact ensemble and general sloppiness. Again, such standards are not characteristic of these players.

In the Schumann Concerto, Elizo Virzaladze, the pianist from Tbilisi returning to the Pavilion stage for a third visit, could not erase vivid memories of more stylish, more touching and more deeply probing performances by this orchestra, with pianists of several generations. Her careful, competent, sometimes oddly phrased, performance revealed neither great insights nor great individuality.