A Tchaikovsky bursting with life

Daniele Gatti conducted the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Wednesday night in a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony that made me think, weirdly, of Morton Feldman.

The American avant-garde composer and the Romantic Russian were opposites. Feldman was a big, outgoing, confident, crude, raucously funny man who wrote exceedingly quiet, very short pieces when he was young and exceedingly quiet, shockingly long pieces when he was old. Fragile, tormented Tchaikovsky drew inward personally but composed music that erupts loudly -- whether the work is big or small, major or minor -- in grandly emotive events.

But here was a familiar Tchaikovsky symphony reminiscent not so much of Feldman’s music (although there was a little of that too) as of Feldman himself, of the way he had of inhaling and exhaling, interrupted by puffs on a cigarette, that seemed to propel his compelling ideas.

That was Gatti’s Tchaikovsky. The Italian conductor has probably never met an instrumental swell he didn’t like (or exaggerate). This was a performance phrased with an even give-and-take of huge inhaling and exhaling. The tempos were often too fast; the climaxes, too vulgar. But the sweep was remarkable. There were disappointments: The clarinet solo at the beginning was mushy. And there were pleasures: The horn melody that opens the slow movement was so serene as to be Feldmanesque. But overall, it was a charismatic performance -- flawed yet alive.

When Gatti was appointed music director of the RPO in 1996, he was a young conductor on a fast career track, while the orchestra’s future was far from assured. London has five major orchestras. That’s too many, and the RPO, founded in 1946 by Thomas Beecham, was the bottom of the barrel.

Still, it survives and, to the surprise of some, so does Gatti, who looked for a while as though he might be a flash in the pan. It was also in 1996 that he made his New York Philharmonic debut conducting a self-indulgent Mahler Sixth that won rave reviews and had the orchestra talking about him as a possible next music director. Two years later, he returned with a self-indulgent Mahler Fifth, and all such talk came to an immediate halt. Gatti tried on Leonard Bernstein’s cape, and it was too big.

Gatti -- who is also music director of Bologna’s opera house, the Teatro Comunale -- is not so much in the limelight these days. Yet, to his credit, he has done what his two more famous immediate predecessors at the RPO -- Andre Previn and Vladimir Ashkenazy -- could not do. He has slowly and diligently improved the orchestra and its fortunes. London’s other orchestras can barely afford to tour and are not in demand by record labels, but Gatti’s got his band on the road. And next month the classy label Harmonia Mundi will issue a Gatti/RPO recording of the Tchaikovsky Fifth on a lavishly produced and packaged CD that will sell for three times the price of the London Symphony Orchestra’s bare-bones self-produced live CDs.

The RPO sounds a bit slicker on the new CD than it did in Segerstrom Hall, but it sounded very good nonetheless. Its glory is the lower strings, which have a distinctive dark chocolate bite. The mellow winds impressed, as did the flawless, smooth brass. Reaching the end of Tchaikovsky’s soul-searching symphony, Gatti had become a kind of musical chef. His baton was a giant whisk, and he was stirring a dozen pots. They all had to boil at the same time, and they did.

The concert would have been better if Gatti was a more interesting programmer. It began with a micromanaged performance of Prokofiev’s lightweight “Classical” Symphony, incisive and interesting in the outer movements but lumpish inside. A young Italian cellist, Silvia Chiesa, was the lyrical, small-toned soloist in a lightweight performance of Saint-Saens’ cotton-candy Cello Concerto No. 1.

Gatti and the RPO will repeat the Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky symphonies at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Wednesday, but a more substantial crowd-pleaser -- Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 -- will replace Saint-Saens’ spun sugar.

*

Royal Philharmonic Orchestra

Where: Royce Hall, UCLA, 10745 Dickson Plaza, Westwood

When: Wednesday, 8 p.m.

Price: $40-$65

Info: (310) 825-2101