Music Reviews : Problematic Program at Greystone Mansion

In the flagstone courtyard at Greystone Mansion on Sunday, Bogidar Avramov led the Beverly Hills Symphony in a problematic program of Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky and Rossini.

An earlier account of the outdoor acoustic complimented its warmth and clarity. Perhaps it depends on where one sits.

From an aisle seat toward the back at the conductor’s right, the higher-pitched instruments did sound clear and bathed in warmth. But the mid-range and lower-pitched instruments sounded muddled and murky, with specific pitches virtually indistinct. An important cello line in the andante of Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 1 all but evaporated.

Overall, Avramov conducted with a careful sense of formal structure, demonstrating more analytical than expressive strengths. Fortunately, in cellist David Shamban, he found a colleague who made up the difference.

Soloist in Tchaikovsky’s “Variations on a Rococo Theme for Cello and Orchestra,” Shamban traced a subtle, evolving musical portrait from an early poised and contemplative voice to a pensive minor variation. Rarely has anyone used the cadenza introducing that variation so well to prepare for remembrances of things past.

Even at its chamber orchestra size--approximately 30 players--the Symphony provided a surprising fullness of sound, with Avramov shaping the opening statement of the theme with lyric suspensions.

In the Mendelssohn symphony, he offered a dramatic, propulsive reading, showing some flexibility in gentler passages but overall apparently content neither to impose his own personality nor find the composer’s personal voice in the score.

The result was a busy, sunless reading, and in places where Mendelssohn obviously looked to earlier models--as he did to the last movement of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 for his finale--he desperately needed a greater interpretive assist than he got.

The conductor opened the program with a controlled, earnest, unsmiling account of the Overture to Rossini’s “The Italian Girl in Algiers.”