MUSIC REVIEW : A Bland Set From Russian National Orchestra

Continuing its first North American tour after a lackluster opening in Pasadena on Thursday, the 2-year-old Russian National Orchestra again made a moderate impression, this time in a Russian program sponsored by the Orange County Philharmonic Society on Wednesday at the O.C. Performing Arts Center.

In music of Tchaikovsky, Scriabin and Prokofiev, founding conductor Mikhail Pletnev served mainly as a self-effacing time-beater, offering few insights into the scores, although he conducted them all from memory.

Indeed, at times one suspected that the orchestra was leading him more than the other way around. Certainly, Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony is music that the musicians must have played enough times to run through in their sleep, and occasionally they seemed to chafe at his metronomic direction, wanting to take the music and run. Would that they had.

Apart from journeyman attention, Pletnev offered few ideas, and those tended to be odd, distorting ones.

He jammed on the brakes to introduce the “melting cantabile”--the phrase is Tovey’s--in the first movement, and so varied tempos in the second that yearning phrases lost their individual as well as cumulative impact. The movement died a slow death. Igor Makarov provided an interestingly melancholic horn solo, however.

One hesitates to say that the Russians played this work without sufficient soul, but we have heard many more impassioned and dramatic interpretations than this.

In Scriabin’s “Poem of Ecstasy,” at least the conductor skirted any perfumed pitfalls, turning in a dry account suited more to 1990s’ safe-sex attitudes than the composer’s mystico-orgasmic visions. The orchestra played with clarity and brightness if not with iridescent colors or heaving momentum, but it certainly made the hall ring in the bombastic, gigantic climaxes.

Pletnev opened the program with a perfect X-ray of Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony, revealing its bony structures but without any of their playful, witty surface--until the final movement, which whizzed by like a comet.

The Russians played two encores: Pletnev’s transcription of Paganini’s “Moto Perpetuo”, and the Spanish Dance from Glazunov’s “Raymonda.”