Andsnes’ Fourth and Treger’s First

Leif Ove Andsnes is a sterling pianist. He is a fresh, young, strong performer. His tone is purling, pealing; his technique effortless. He has that rare and precious ability to convey a youthful sense of astonishment about a musical phrase, which makes whatever he plays sound like a wonderful discovery.

And suddenly, but not surprisingly, the music world is Andsnes’ oyster. The boyishly handsome 27-year-old Norwegian pianist has just been awarded the 1998 Gilmore Award, a $300,000 prize given every four years to an unsuspecting pianist to further his or her career. Meanwhile, his latest alluring recording, a solo Schumann disc on EMI, was just nominated for a Grammy.

So lucky was the Los Angeles Philharmonic to have the foresight to have engaged Andsnes to play the Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Friday night. But, then, unlucky was the orchestra. Its young, handsome and rising-star guest conductor, Franz Welser-Most, canceled at the eleventh hour. His back was acting up from an old automobile accident injury.

The philharmonic is an organization that sometimes demonstrates more vision than prudence, which usually is great for the art but occasionally a problem. The problem this time is that it never got around to hiring a new assistant conductor after Grant Gershon’s three-year tenure expired in the fall.

In a pinch, it turned instead to its concertmaster, Alexander Treger, who has conducting ambitions (he becomes music director of the American Youth Symphony next season) but who had never before conducted the orchestra with which he has played for 25 years.

The concerto, naturally enough, belonged to Andsnes. The Fourth is less showy than Beethoven’s other piano concertos, and one might have wished for a little more poetic interplay between soloist and orchestra. Treger kept accompaniment a bit vague and in the background. But that also meant that every perfectly sculpted piano phrase stood out even more--nothing flashy, just the lustrous, satisfying glow of platinum among cheaper metals.

Andsnes is a fine classicist. He weighs and balances his tone, shapes each gesture, with refinement and grace. But it takes tremendous potential energy to maintain that sensation of equipoise, and like an acrobat he can take your breath away when he unexpectedly releases some of it. That was the character of the big cadenza of the first movement.

Treger, who is Russian and was trained in Moscow, embodies a different, more blunt, sensibility. He exchanged the originally programmed and seldom heard Sixth Symphony of Prokofiev with the much more familiar, exquisite personal anguishes of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony.

It is a work that Treger clearly knows well. He has strong ideas about it. The slow movement was quite broad; the three other movements pressed forth with great speed. Unlike Andsnes, Treger musters musical energy with hard, forthright muscle. He doesn’t seem preoccupied with achieving perfection of execution. But he does sense the force of this music, and he conveys it for the raw power it is, but without ever seeming to exaggerate. That is a balancing act of its own.

It is not an effective approach in all music, and Dvorak’s “The Wood Dove,” a substantial 18-minute tone poem, sounded further from Treger’s heart. It was slow, heavy and prosaic--but it was Welser-Most’s choice. It was also the first work on the program, and perhaps Treger, having waited 25 years for this moment in front of his orchestra, needed a few more moments to be ready to make the most of it.

* Leif Ove Andsnes performs Beethoven’s Quintet for Piano and Winds with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Chamber Music Society at 8 tonight, Gindi Auditorium, University of Judaism, 15600 Mulholland Drive. $25. (213) 850-2000.