MUSIC REVIEWS : Brahms Third From Ohyama Worth the Wait

Brahms is such a constant and ubiquitous presence on our musical landscape that it sometimes seems that laws should be passed, regulations made, licenses given only to those performers who can demonstrate that they have something new, clean and pure to say with the music: a kind of Brahmsian smog check.

Not that anything that transpired on the Japan America Symphony’s season-ending Brahms concert Monday night at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion was a painful thing. Far from it. You simply had to wade through the mundane before you got to the glory.

Tomoko Kato, a second-prize winner in the 1982 Tchaikovsky Competition, was the soloist in Brahms’ Violin Concerto. She produced a solid, basic reading of the score. She displayed a big, bright and ringing tone and an impressive, albeit unshowy, technical mastery. She could declaim Brahms’ profundities with authority and sing sweetly in contrast, but did both sporadically. Mostly she underplayed the rhetoric, and did so leisurely. Few sparks flew.

The accompaniment of music director Heiichiro Ohyama and orchestra offered vitality and detail, often proving more interesting than the solo line.

With his reading of the Symphony No. 3 after intermission, however, Ohyama made up for the wait, and then some. The former principal violist and assistant conductor of the Philharmonic is consistently one of our best area conductors, and this interpretation showed his usual deep thought, affection and purpose. While sculpting a highly nuanced, multicolored and always expressive performance, he never bogged down in detail. Leaving no stone unturned, he saw the forest for the trees. Seldom has one heard the third movement so perfectly poised or the outer movements brought to such thrilling, but earned, conclusion.

The Japan American musicians, lean in sound, responded with precision, attentive to dynamic subtlety and focused in intensity. It was, in short, a breath of fresh air.

As other local groups have done, the orchestra paid tribute to member hornist Ned Treuenfels, killed in a car crash two weeks ago, with a performance of Bach’s “Air on the G String” before the concert proper.