Pletnev and Orchestra Are a Splendid Russian Export

Each dispatch from the new Russia, what with its crumbling infrastructure and crass millionaires, seems grimmer than the last. For instance, it was reported Tuesday about the ground in Moscow giving way underfoot and unsuspecting pedestrians tumbling into pits of boiling water, thanks to leaking heating pipes.

So it is a particular pleasure to be able to report the good news about the Russian National Orchestra, which performed Tuesday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Here is a Moscow success story. Formed in 1990 by the riveting pianist and conductor Mikhail Pletnev, the ensemble was a hit from its first concert. With a series of exceptionally engaging recordings on Deutsche Grammophon, the orchestra has come to represent a return to elegance and sophistication in a country where such a thought now appears almost subversive.

Not everything, of course, works smoothly with the Russian National Orchestra. The players are said to complain about the state of their instruments. Pletnev complains that his record company and foreign presenters want only the most enticing Russian favorites. And the orchestra complains about the ceaseless necessity of courting wealthy sponsors.

All that was apparent Tuesday. It would have been an accomplishment to come up with a less demanding program than one based around Glazunov’s quaint Violin Concerto and Tchaikovsky’s maniacally tuneful Symphony No. 2 and still retain substance. The orchestra, wonderfully refined in quiet passages, tended toward the kind of coarseness in the symphony’s climaxes that really did sound more the consequence of mechanics than musicians. And with its hand held out for fund-raising, the orchestra lured a row of movie stars for the festivities.

Yet there could be no better advertisement for the new Russia than the way this orchestra turns necessity into virtue. The celebrities--Sophia Loren, Gregory Peck, Lauren Bacall, Jennifer Jones--were the kind of old Hollywood royalty that makes an audience feel as if it is someplace special. The Glazunov had the young Gil Shaham as soloist, a violinist who inhabits this music with utter conviction. And Pletnev’s pointedly colorful readings of three small character pieces by Liadov proved that refinement is the natural state of the orchestra, and any coarseness of sound was by choice.

For all his American bounciness, Shaham plays Glazunov very much in the tradition of the legendary Russian fiddlers. Nothing is forced. He spins the sugared melodies fine as cotton candy. The virtuosity appears effortless. And even the violinist’s understated and narrowly focused tone proved salutary--too much richness here and the music can swell into slick slush. Instead it spoke of Old World suaveness.

But the Tchaikovsky symphony, known as the “Little Russian,” was the point of the program. Pletnev may be after something just a bit more Big Russian, even Brucknerian, than the symphony, with its perorations on folk tunes, might seem to warrant. But he is persuasive. One was struck most by the color, which is Tchaikovsky’s glory. Each section of the orchestra sounds distinctive. The winds are dark; the strings are smooth and glassy; the brass is burnished as if old and timeless.

The Tchaikovsky symphony is usually thought of as lightweight, more charming than consequential. But it was a favorite of Stravinsky, who often conducted it and demonstrated in it a rhythmic inventiveness. Pletnev probes for something different. He goes for a depth of sound, and he finds it both in massed sonorities and in an entrancing bringing out of detail. Like everything else about the way he runs this orchestra, he takes nothing for granted in Tchaikovsky. And also like everything else about this remarkable organization, he makes it seem not just new but newly worthwhile.