Music Review : Orchestra’s Youthful Eagerness Falls Short

With hardly a gray hair on stage, the Four Seasons Orchestra brought the energy and excesses of youth to a mostly Liszt program at the Irvine Barclay Theatre on Sunday.

There is much to recommend the exuberance of the young--Franz Doppler’s arrangement of the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 benefited from exaggerated detail and high-spirited romping.

A string of solos highlighted the strengths of individual players, including violinist Albert Wu--one of the apprentices from the group’s college-high school orchestra, La Primavera--and stressed great potential for growth.

Yet, in the first concert since the latest incarnation of the band--originally formed in 1990 by violist Carolyn Broe, newly reorganized under director Roger Hickman--promise often had to suffice. Infectious animation may augment sophistication and subtlety, but it cannot replace these qualities.

This was overripe Romanticism, with captivating moments of well-turned phrases--especially from first-chair winds--and plenty of saber-rattling, but little sense of sustained direction or softly colored musing. “Les Preludes” fared poorly.

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Soloist Leonid Kuzmin offered further tribute to bombast in two works for piano and orchestra, “Totentanz” and the Hungarian Fantasy. The first, Liszt’s paraphrase on the chant melody “Dies Irae,” from the Requiem Mass, lent irony considering the resurrection of the accompanying ensemble after two years of preparations. Nevertheless, Kuzmin wielded serious technical prowess in a performance impressive for its power, if not for its poetic depth.

The Fantasy offered a few more opportunities for delicate respite and amiability, which the pianist seized attentively between massive chordal passages.

Then, for encores, as if there had not been enough proof of digital dexterity, he flew through two of Chopin’s Etudes--Opus 10, No. 5, in G-flat, and the “Revolutionary”--breaking from the pyrotechnics for a moment of meditative elegance in the Mazurka in C, Opus 33, No. 3.