Music Review : Pletnev Delivers a Grand Performance

Mikhail Pletnev is one of those conductors who, when the violins are sawing furiously, the woodwinds whirring dizzily and the brass blazing away, likes to stand there rapt and still, the calm at the center of a howling storm, basking in the fury.

In a quiet, cuter moment, he will turn to the violins, give a little smirk, raise an eyebrow, bob his head and flip his wrist--a mime to the music. He’s not exactly a showboater (he’s too controlled for that), but he’s a bit of a ham.

The 38-year-old Russian, making his first appearance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Thursday night in Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, rather obviously wanted to make an impression. His interpretations of standards by Beethoven and Tchaikovsky had Great Performances written all over them. Luckily, they also happened to be great performances.

Pletnev, a composer and notable pianist who won the 1978 Tchaikovsky Competition, is an intelligent and tasteful musician, one who puts a personal stamp on the music he conducts. And Thursday he elicited exceptionally alert and burnished playing from the Philharmonic. With the strings seated a la Russe (with violins split left and right, basses and cellos to the left), the orchestra’s sound took on a clarity and warmth not always heard in this hall.

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4 emerged grand and genial, qualities underlined at the expense of tempo, but the performance was so carefully detailed, warm-blooded and rhythmically alive, only a haggler would mind. About the only objection one could make was to a bassoon slur in the finale, which kind of ruins Beethoven’s joke.

Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, “Pathetique,” became both morose and Technicolored, brilliant and plush of palette (with outstanding playing from the woodwind section, placed well forward in the sound picture), and almost ethereal in its sadness. Pletnev pulled back just a smidgen at the end of the third movement march (thereby miraculously stifling most of the applause) and then launched into a rich and melancholy but by no means maudlin finale. Quite a calling card.

* Mikhail Pletnev conducts the same program at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., tonight at 8 and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. (213) 850-2000.