Youth symphony acts all grown up

The American Youth Symphony is 40. That means 40 years of pre-professional training for young musicians in their late teens and early 20s. AYS alumni dot America’s orchestras, and that warrants celebration. So, too, does the fact that Sunday evening, the AYS, noble and essential, filled the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion with an elegant crowd for its 40th anniversary gala.

A gifted emerging composer, Lena Auerbach, was commissioned to write a new work for the occasion. Yundi Li, a 22-year-old sensation from China with a big Deutsche Grammophon record contract, was the soloist in Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Alexander Treger, the orchestra’s music director since 1998, ended the program with Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. The whole thing will be repeated Saturday, when the orchestra makes its New York debut at Carnegie Hall. The gala was a big night.

Auerbach, who is the AYS composer in residence and also an accomplished violinist, is worth watching. She’s quite a showoff, but impressive music seems to pour out of her in a relentless rush. A young woman from Russia who says in her program note that she grew up far from but ever dreaming about the sea, she dedicated her new piece, “Dreams and Whispers of Poseidon,” to the memory of December’s tsunami victims.

The music is awash in waves of color. It sounds as swollen as a ravenous, wrathful sea. And, like the sea, the score gets carried away.

Manic Shostakovich and somber Prokofiev inhabit Auerbach’s imagination, but she goes in for her own variety of weirdness as well. Eerie sounds presage underwater roiling, the peculiar atmosphere in which nothing appears to be happening on the surface but deep down are the stirrings of something momentous. Strings slice and pierce the air with their ghostly harmonics. Wind instruments and brass crinkle into tight-knit, clashing chords. Bells toll. Near the end, a violin and viola, accompanied by harp, mourn. A musical saw and theremin do a good job of conveying seasickness.

Although Auerbach’s voice is still in development, her personality cannot be missed. She should be encouraged.

Yundi Li, for his part, arrives with a reputation for technical wizardry and cool elegance. The wizardry is definitely there. His command of the keyboard is Horowitzian. There may be nothing he can’t do.

Whether he can be considered elegant, though, is a matter of taste. His tone is clear and sparkling. Every note is crystalline and exactly placed, whether he obeys the speed limit or not. But Li’s been rushed into the marketplace. His playing is pat, as if he thinks of Chopin’s concerto as made up of nice patterns all pleasingly interlocking. His detailing was brilliant, and his talent is without question. I just wish everyone would lay off him for a while and let him grow. But that won’t happen. DG has at least one solo release a year planned until 2009.

Tchaikovsky’s symphony was for the orchestra. Treger, who is also the Los Angeles Philharmonic concertmaster, is a Russian and conducts like one. His response to Tchaikovsky’s melancholy is as if second nature, and he gets that across even to young players in whom darkness may not yet have penetrated very far. The slow movement’s famously affectionate horn solo had well-rounded grace as played by Jenny Kim; her confidence seemed to inspire more throughout the ranks.

Best of all, the orchestra dug in. When not lamenting, Tchaikovsky thunders, and the AYS, while not always slickly in tune, thunders with exhilarating glee. Unfortunately, the Chandler didn’t dig out the risers that the Los Angeles Philharmonic had built for the stage. They would, I suspect, have unclotted the string sound. Still, Tchaikovsky’s symphony had life in it.

So, unfortunately, do some youth orchestra offenders -- patrons who act as if it’s all about them. One bought the right to conduct the national anthem on Sunday and pranced through his fantasy, confusing the kids and leaving a sour first impression of the orchestra. Won’t someone please give him back his money before he gets to Carnegie?

And how about all those congratulations from City Hall, Sacramento and Washington proudly reproduced in the program book? Los Angeles’ mayor and both California senators were among those appropriately acknowledging the AYS at 40. The governor’s office must have run out of stationery.