Thibaudet’s Liszt Winds Up a Bit Listless

Robert and Clara Schumann, who knew a thing or two about the piano, were deeply moved, even to tears, when they heard Liszt play. So what are we to make of Jean-Yves Thibaudet’s performance of Liszt’s Concerto No. 1 and “Totentanz” (Dance of Death) with the Los Angeles Philharmonic on Saturday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion?

Certainly Thibaudet has prodigious technique, although that has to be a given for anyone venturing Liszt to a paying public.

The French pianist plays octaves and fistfuls of notes with speed and clarity. He exploits a wide-ranging spectrum of touch and dynamic. He has taste. He has sensitivity. He has stamina. His cadenzas sound symphonic. He may have the most fluent glissandi in the business.

But apart from all this technique, he offered virtually nothing in terms of phrasing of character or a sense of the composer or even the performer’s personality.

Maybe he was reacting against so-called excesses of pianists of previous generations. But Liszt without emotional interpretation ultimately is a hollow exercise.

The composer never was a particularly great orchestrator, and “Totentanz” may be a notch or two below his usual standard in this regard, as well as in creativity. But surely the orchestra could have ventured more supportive, expressive playing than the Philharmonic did under guest conductor Emmanuel Krivine.

Interpretively, Krivine was in sync with Thibaudet. He never got in the way of the soloist, nor urged him to greater heights. The two ended both works with razor-sharp precision.

On his own, however, in the second half of the concert, Krivine emerged as virtually a routinier.

He led an eccentric account of Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony, to put it kindly, and a disjointed, mind-wandering interpretation of Debussy’s “La Mer.”

The Prokofiev symphony began with a feeling of slippage in presenting thematic material clearly. As the work developed, phrases dovetailed into one another before reaching completion. No notes were cut, but finality wasn’t achieved, either.

The conductor occasionally emphasized secondary matters more than primary. There seemed to be a lot of measure-treading.

In leading “La Mer,” Krivine rarely explored Debussy’s magical exploration of color and instrumental combinations. He created little sense of sweep, cohesion, weight or inevitability of moving forward. It was a stop-and-start performance. Krivine conducted both works from memory. He had used scores in the first half of the concert.

The orchestra sounded dispirited. Despite the conductor’s (and soloist’s) propensity for quick tempos, the evening seemed very long.