Kreizberg Leads Philharmonic Through Solid Performances

As he proved again this week, when Yakov Kreizberg is on the podium of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the orchestra is in good hands. The 40-year-old Russian-born conductor led the Philharmonic through a program of works by Beethoven, Peteris Vasks and Shostakovich in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Thursday night and, with strong help from the orchestra, produced convincing and authoritative performances.

Because it was the only masterpiece on the agenda, Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, played by Hilary Hahn, dominated the evening. Hahn, now all of 20 years old, brought all her considerable virtuosity and musical sagacity to the assignment. The young fiddler remains a figure of calm in a profession characterized by anxiety.

Her playing brought into tight combination the work’s most pertinent features, and unflagging, effortless technique and articulate music making. Except for a couple of moments of lost focus--in the first-movement cadenza--this was an exalted performance, aided in no small part by conductor Kreizberg and the Philharmonic.

A clean linearity and unambiguous readings characterized the second half of the evening, when Kreizberg introduced a “Cantabile” for strings (1979) by Latvian composer Vasks and brought back to the Philharmonic repertory the oft-neglected Symphony No. 9 by Shostakovich.

Vasks’ eight-minute piece is an intense and handsome meditation that here served as a serious prelude to Shostakovich’s Ninth, a work that is easy to like but perhaps impossible to love. Granted that some of this composer’s dramatic and overwrought pieces can grate almost painfully upon the listener, this one goes to the other extreme in being jolly and mindless. Kreizberg coaxed from the willing orchestra a virtually immaculate performance, yet, even that couldn’t lend much substance to the work.

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* This program will be repeated tonight at 8; Sunday, 2:30 p.m., Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. $10-$70. (323) 850-2000.