Music Reviews : Season Opens for Youth Symphony

The American Youth Symphony’s 29th season, billed as “season of the search for the eventual successor to Maestro Mehta, 85, with three Guest Conductors,” opened Sunday night at Royce Hall with Maestro Mehta himself on the podium.

The music by Tchaikovsky, acknowledging the 100th anniversary of his death, encompassed the extremes of the composer’s manic-depressive personality: the exuberant Piano Concerto No. 2 and the suicidal Symphony No. 6.

The performances were relentlessly magnificent, Mehta urging on his youthful charges to increasingly greater rushes of energy and virtuosity, with little interest in softer dynamics or subtler interpretive nuances.

The soloist was thrilling too: 25-year-old, Moscow-born Kirill Gliadkovsky (currently a doctoral student at USC) playing all the notes of the concerto with manic desperation but given hardly any opportunity by the charging Mehta to explore the music’s gentler side. In the second movement, played with the standard cut by Tchaikovsky pupil Alexander Siloti, concertmaster Bing Wang and principal cellist Cameron Stone played their solos with perfect intonation and compelling passion.