MUSIC REVIEW : A Surprise Debut at Philharmonic

If all had gone as planned, the concert at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Wednesday would have been one of those all-too-rare occasions when a woman conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Unfortunately, Sian Edwards opted to stay in London and confront the financial problems threatening the English National Opera, which she serves as music director.

Under normal conditions, the Philharmonic might have turned over her subscription programs to a resident associate- or assistant-conductor. But our orchestra no longer seems to deem either of these positions a necessity.

Ergo, the management had to scramble for a suitable replacement. The ultimate choice turned out to be Eiji Oue.

Eiji Oue?

Local music-lovers beset with incorrigibly trivial memories may recall him as the first student to conduct the now-lamented Philharmonic Institute Orchestra. His brief debut took place at Hollywood Bowl in the summer of ’82.

On that eminently forgettable evening, one observer--this one--reported that “with infinite manicuring of phrases and backward flips for dynamic punctuation, Oue came perilously close to conducting the national anthem to death.” Then, it said here, he “imposed comparable interpretive excesses on a chronically crisp and energetic race through Berlioz’s ‘Corsaire’ overture.”

Since that time, the Hiroshima native has spent four years as associate-conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic and the last three as music-director in Erie, Pa. Just last week, it was announced that he would become music director of the Minnesota Orchestra in 1995.

*

In his new job, he will take his place in a line of conductors that includes such distinguished names as Eugene Ormandy, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Antal Dorati, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Neville Marriner and Edo de Waart. Minneapolis officials issued a rather odd, almost defensive statement affirming the newcomer’s status as “a long shot” for the post.

Oue, they admitted, could be categorized as a “younger, lesser-known conductor.” But, they protested, almost too much, “if anyone has doubts about the recommendation of our search committee . . . he or she will find that Eiji’s natural talents . . . will usher our orchestra into an exciting new era of artistic successes.”

One hopes the optimism is justified. The evidence presented by Oue, now 37, to a rather sparse audience in the first of his four Music Center concerts wasn’t particularly promising.

In the first half of the program, he retained the Berlioz-Mozart agenda scheduled for Edwards. In the second, he abandoned the promised Dvorak and Janacek selections in favor of Schumann’s Second Symphony.

Oue--whose name, according to the Minnesota press release, is pronounced “Oh-way”--conducted everything with fussy expressive urgency, emoting flamboyantly, cueing fastidiously, often losing the musical forest while focusing on trees of minor significance. His studiously frenetic efforts did little, one had to assume, but make the seasoned Philharmonic players nervous.

*

The “Benvenuto Cellini” overture emerged noisy and disjointed. Oue provided erratic accompaniment for Stephen Hough, whose possibly distracted performance of Mozart’s E-flat Concerto, K. 271, vacillated between feathery poetry and clunky prose. The noble Schumann symphony, for which the management provided a ridiculously inadequate five-sentence program note, sounded hard-driven, jerky, dynamically monotonous and ultimately anti-climactic.

In commemoration of the international day of mourning in response to the AIDS crisis, the conductor and many members of the orchestra wore symbolic red ribbons. At the beginning of the concert, the audience was asked to stand for a minute of silent tribute.