Strong at times, but focus wanders

Beethoven’s dramatic Third Piano Concerto seems ill-designed to be a curtain-raiser. But that’s what it served as in the oddly paired Beethoven-Shostakovich Los Angeles Philharmonic program Thursday at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

As if the concerto were a lightweight overture, management allowed lots of late arrivals to stream noisily into the vividly alive hall as pianist Alfred Brendel and guest conductor David Zinman waited patiently between the first two movements. The interruption was especially jarring because Brendel launched into the ethereal E-major Largo with a haunting, meditative pensiveness.

An old pro at this work, Brendel generally made his impact with strong, direct, unfinicky attention to the music. He avoided nuances and opportunities for little personal inflections in favor of long-breathed, heroic lines delivered with unflagging strength. Zinman, for his part, not only followed closely and sensitively but also managed to combine lyric grace with dramatic propulsion.

Zinman’s taut, exciting attention to the concerto promised much for Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 8, the second and grimmest of the three so-called “War” symphonies and a crushing contrast to Beethoven, performed after the intermission. But this cinematic, sprawling, apocalyptic work had too many moments of wandering focus.

It began well, with knife-thrust statements from the cellos and basses followed by an arresting, thin, suspended theme high in the violins. Zinman was sensitive to Shostakovich’s degrees of gray desolation in a blasted landscape and also to his depiction of the confident banalities of a war machine.

But missing was another degree of significance -- what Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, for instance, has found in the Third Movement, making it an utterly terrifying air raid. With Zinman, it sounded more like a confused steeplechase. And the mourning movement that comes next emerged too lyrically.

Still, Zinman didn’t lose his concentration and kept conducting when a front-row patron collapsed on the stairs as he was trying to leave the hall and numerous audience members went to his aid.

Everyone was affected nonetheless. Maybe that’s why the challenging questions in the last movement -- whether Shostakovich intended to show signs of insanity amid the rubble, new life emerging or, rather, a Russian trickster asserting a last ghostly presence -- remained unanswered. The Eighth is not an easy work.

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Los Angeles Philharmonic

Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: Today, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 p.m.

Price: $15-$120

Contact: (323) 850-2000