Harth-Bedoya Conducts With Appealing Warmth

Miguel Harth-Bedoya is rising fast. Appointed last season as one of three assistant conductors of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the charismatic 31-year-old conductor from Peru has already become a familiar presence in the orchestra’s community concerts and its Saturday-morning programs for young people. The Philharmonic players reportedly are crazy about him. Recently he was promoted to associate conductor, and Saturday night Harth-Bedoya conducted his first winter season subscription concert in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

After three high-powered weeks led by Esa-Pekka Salonen, the feeling in the Pavilion was decidedly different. Some in the audience had been attracted by a special promotion handed out during a Philharmonic program of Latin music given at Cal State L.A., and Harth-Bedoya welcomed them from the stage and went out of his way to make any newcomers to classical music feel at home. The evening was one of Ravel and Schumann favorites. It was an occasion for youth, since Max Levinson, the 27-year-old Angeleno now based in Boston, also made his Philharmonic debut in Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G.

It didn’t take long to discover just what it is that local audiences and musicians alike respond to in Harth-Bedoya. Musically, he is fun to be around. His charisma is not so much marked by flashiness as a kind of looseness. In a showpiece like Ravel’s “Rapsodie Espagnole,” the Philharmonic lost a bit of the stellar edge that it had been spectacularly displaying under Salonen recently, but the musical mood was wonderful--from the soft summer-evening sounds at the beginning to the happy carnival atmosphere at the end.

Schumann’s First Symphony (“Spring”), which closed the program, was equally gregarious. The first movement, which is built on a bounding rhythm, was best. Harth-Bedoya seemed to get into a boisterous groove and simply let the symphony go, riding it as much as leading it. Young conductors today tend to be excellent technicians, but Harth-Bedoya still has craft to master. The slow movement was finely shaped and beguilingly lyrical and there was proper energy given to the Scherzo and no lack of animation in the finale. But balances and details were not flawless and the interpretation was not always distinct.

Conducting is the performing arts’ most mysterious occupation. The communication between an arm-waver and sound-producer, to say nothing of between conductor and audience, is not a science. Charisma means a great deal, and Harth-Bedoya communicates a warm, exciting and engaging musicality that seems to get an immediate response from musicians and listeners. Music for him seems an uncomplicated and direct joy. If--as he grows and becomes more complicated--he keeps the directness and joy, he will be special.

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Levinson, who played the Ravel concerto with a fleet grace and elegance, is, on the other hand, a pianist sophisticated beyond his years. His technique is so spectacular he seems to take it for granted, and almost seemed to be gliding through the concerto. There was a bit of pretense in the slow movement, milking perhaps Ravel’s loveliest melody for its last inch of poetry, but the poetry was real.

The jazzy finale was played with a fine sense of fancy. But there is also a connoisseur’s seriousness, and chamber music inwardness, to Levinson’s style that did fully correspond to Harth-Bedoya’s more generalized outgoing manner. The pianist was, as a result, sometimes buried. But think of it as a tease. It only makes us want him back that much sooner.