A Well-Played, Uncompelling Eighth Symphony

No inspired purpose, no blazing insights and few cathartic moments markedPaavo Berglund’s efficient leadership of Shostakovich’s enigmatic Eighth Symphony when the Finnish conductor returned to the podium of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Thursday night.

Instead, the patient Philharmonic audience, which remained in its seats through the hourlong work (unlike eight years ago, when listeners fled before and during the first of four performances by a different conductor), was accorded a well-played, tightly balanced but uncompelling reading of the large-boned piece.

To his credit, Berglund, who remains as dour and diligent as we remember him, did not interfere with the players or lead them into wrongheaded musical paths. Yet he failed to create a performance that made sense of the whole work or justified this revival.

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For their part, the instrumentalists held the reading together--though they could not by themselves unravel the problematic, apparently meandering first movement. Still, the numerous exposed solo lines emerged heroic and meaningful, and the choral outbursts in the first march fit convincingly into the whole. Is it a great work? Probably, but this performance did not prove it.

The unconnected first half of this program brought the 39-year-old Taiwan-born, Chinese American violinist Cho-Liang Lin back to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, joining the 70-year-old conductor and the orchestra in a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto.

It was an effortless and charming performance, one without stress or strain, a reminder that melody, not passage work, is at the core of this beloved work, that the central Canzonetta actually holds the showpiece outer movements together, that a beautiful sound is the most important resource of any violinist’s arsenal of attributes. Berglund and the orchestra contributed strongly to this reminder.

* L.A. Philharmonic, Paavo Berglund, conducting; Cho-Liang Lin, violin, repeats this program tonight at 8 and Sunday, 2:30 p.m., Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. (213) 365-3500. $10-$70.