Violinist Repin Brings Daring, Intensity to Shostakovich

The festive, casually carefree ambience of the Hollywood Bowl is perhaps a strange place in which to contemplate the wintry depths of Dmitri Shostakovich.

But of course, irony was one of the most potent weapons of this man of many masks, and thanks to the intensity of 28-year-old Russian violinist Vadim Repin, Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1 survived the not-so-great outdoors just fine Thursday night.

The concerto was written during the 1948 Soviet purge of composers, and withheld from performance until two years after Stalin’s death. David Oistrakh, the dedicatee and active consultant in its composition, owned this piece in his day, and the young Maxim Vengerov is its most passionate current champion.

But Repin is gaining fast. He took a daringly slow tempo in the Nocturne and made it work, adopting a somewhat bleak tone and letting it gradually bloom sweetly without going over the top into sentimentality. He brought the right abrasive edge to the Scherzo, as well as enough variety in phrasing to maintain the tension of the torturously long cadenza, and he gave the finale plenty of drive, a few unique ideas, and an antic quality at a rip-roaring clip.

Some of the meaning underneath these notes still eludes Repin--his Passacaglia is more songful than grieving--and Eri Klas and the Los Angeles Philharmonic seemed only sporadically in touch with the emotional content (albeit frequently masked by freeway noise).

Yet this disturbing music still made most of its impact on a fittingly overcast night.

On a more tuneful Russian plane, there were some passages in the middle of Borodin’s Overture to “Prince Igor” where the strings nearly got out of control, but Klas pulled things back together.

The Philharmonic turned in its best playing by far in the piece it knew best, the Ravel orchestration of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” where Klas aimed his tempos straight down the middle and several expert soloists (particularly stalwart trumpeter Thomas Stevens) could shine.