MUSIC REVIEW : British Guests, Philharmonic Play Comfortable Favorites

Adventure being a hard spirit to sustain, a concert such as this may have been inevitable. With the excitement of a Lutoslawski premiere last week and Ligeti next week, the Los Angeles Philharmonic settled on comfortable favorites this week.

Both of the British guests with the orchestra, conductor Andrew Davis and pianist Stephen Hough, are also frequent visitors here. Happily, they brought more than just familiarity to their assignments Thursday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Davis’ ideas about Elgar’s “Enigma” Variations placed a premium on structural integrity, without minimizing the natural contrasts. He did bring things nearly to a halt for climactic indulgence in the “Nimrod” variation, but otherwise took a swiftly paced view of the character drama.

He proved similarly brisk with Richard Strauss’ “Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche,” keen on expressive nuances but not sentimental dawdling. It was often musically exaggerated--particularly in accent and dynamics--but never rhetorically dull.

The Philharmonic gave him of its loudest, if not always its best. Balances in the big moments--and there were many--seemed a matter of everyone for themselves, some of the individual solos in “Till Eulenspiegel” emerged fuzzy, and Davis was not able to shift gears between the variations without some patches of inarticulate coasting.

But for rich, ripe sounds in rich, ripe music, this would be a tough evening to beat. Alas, less welcome extracurricular sounds were also much in evidence, rising to a disfiguring peak when an offstage electronic whistling impinged on the beginning of Elgar’s penultimate variation, to which volleys of aggressive coughing applied the terminal touch.

Hough had two compact display vehicles at his disposal, juxtaposing brilliance and bombast. He acquitted himself honorably if not invariably accurately in the octave gymnastics of Liszt’s Concerto No. 1, favored the sprinting bass lines in Mendelssohn’s “Capriccio Brillant” over the equally active treble, and brought affecting elegance and intelligence to bear on both.