O.C. MUSIC REVIEW : State Symphony: From Russia With Resonance

The State Symphony of Russia, which played a triumphant concert at the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Sunday afternoon, used to be just one of 10 government-sponsored orchestras in Communist Moscow.

Formed in 1936, the mighty ensemble made its first foreign appearance in 1957 and its first visit to Southern California three years later. The 1994 tour is the eighth for the State Symphony in North America.

One would trivialize the obvious to say that much has happened since we first encountered the itinerant Muscovites at Shrine Auditorium in 1960 (with Kiril Kondrashin on the podium and Emil Gilels as stellar firebrand). The shifting name of the organization tells enough: What started as the Moscow State Symphony became the U.S.S.R. State Symphony before assuming its current all-purpose identity.

Still, an orchestra is an orchestra is an orchestra. Some things don’t change.

Yevgeny Svetlanov, born in 1928 and the much-decorated music director since 1965, still mans the podium with authoritative, businesslike decorum that masks an obviously flamboyant temperament. The players still file onstage in democratic unison, led by the self-effacing concertmaster. At the end, a particularly valiant player may rise from the ranks, however, to take a bow from the maestro’s podium in reward for an incidental solo.

If all had gone as planned, Los Angeles would have heard the State Symphony in a strangely constituted pops concert Saturday at UCLA. Unfortunately, the recent quake caused structural quivers at Royce Hall that forced cancellation of this and similar projects.

Under the circumstances, one had to be doubly grateful for the Orange County concert. The program here offered a sophisticated all-Russian agenda that paid easy homage to just one potboiler: Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 2 in C minor, a.k.a. “Full Slushpump and Empty Arms.”

The only possible chagrin involved an unexplained switch in keyboard protagonists. The vaunted Alexei Sultanov was promised; one Vladimir Ovchinikov was delivered. The disappointment turned out to be bearable.

Ovchinikov, a prizewinner from the Urals apparently in his boyish 30s, is not your average whiz-bang heart-on-cuff virtuoso. He made a noble effort to keep Rachmaninoff’s sparks in check, along with his push-button tears. One could argue that he slighted the romantic rhetoric. Still, erring on the side of restraint is better than erring on the other side.

His fervor and intelligence--not to mention his fine sense of rubato and subtle use of color--made one eager to overlook a couple of technical lapses. And it wasn’t his fault that the local piano at his disposal sounded tinny amid the unusually opulent orchestral timbres.

The discerning audience of the Orange County Philharmonic Society, it should be noted, managed to resist the temptation to shatter the mood with premature applause after the first movement. There may be hope.

Svetlanov, who chooses not to use a baton these days, opened the festivities with “Prince Golitsin’s Journey,” a brooding interlude from Mussorgsky’s “Khovanshchina.” It served to remind us how dark and resonant this orchestra habitually sounds. The bass rumbled, the treble throbbed, and everyone really sang. Together.

After intermission, Svetlanov turned to the mystical poetry of Liadov’s “Enchanted Lake.” In the delicate process, he contradicted popular claims that his orchestra soars better than it shimmers.

It did soar, however, with roof-rattling, gut-thumping bravura in the sensitively gauged performance of Scriabin’s “Le poeme de l’extase” that followed. With the conductor blithely grunting the finest vocal obbligatos this side of Toscanini, the swelling crescendos brought the program to a Wagnerian close and the audience to its feet.

Any encore would have been anticlimactic, both literally and figuratively.