Vivaldi, seasoned with fine solo work

Vivaldi may be the composer most vulnerable to being mischaracterized. Yes, “The Four Seasons” is a series of violin concertos, and, yes, each concerto is made up of three movements.

But anyone at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Friday night quickly realized the significance of the secondary solo parts -- whether other violins, viola or cello -- in their varied, evergreen interactions with the prominent soloists. Moreover, almost every movement contains divisions and excursions that immeasurably deepen Vivaldi’s apparent economy of means.

All this was especially evident as four orchestra violinists sequentially took the limelight with a buoyant, scaled-down ensemble under the direction of Miguel Harth-Bedoya. Michele Bovyer brought a rich and burnished polish to Spring. Akiko Tarumoto spun out long, limpid lines in Summer. Stacy Wetzel made Autumn a springy, elated celebration, while Jonathan Wei turned Winter into a brilliant tour de force.

Vivaldi shared the program -- part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Casual Friday series -- with Respighi. The composer may have bitten off more than he could chew in his “Roman Festivals,” a cinematic cultural history of the Eternal City, beginning with pagan Rome and ending in the late 1920s.

In powerfully evoking the soul-sickening blood guilt of events in the Circus Maximus, Respighi laid down the need for the weary struggle toward expiation in the next movement, “The Jubilee.” Yet he could not obliterate it, for all his efforts in the bounty of Nature in “October Festivals” or the party-time hysteria of “Epiphany.”

Harth-Bedoya led the orchestra resourcefully, but Respighi, to his credit, could not shake his vision of Rome as -- to appropriate Athanael’s line about Alexandria in Massenet’s “Thais” -- that “terrible city.”