Precision, passion heat Shostakovich concerto

The technical difficulties of Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1 are formidable. But they’re outweighed by the interpretive ones. Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg met both challenges in a masterly performance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, led by Miguel Harth-Bedoya, on Friday in the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Two of the movements -- the second and fourth -- are given over to overt display, although there’s more to them than that. The first and third are introspective and demand soul-searching from soloist and orchestra.

Salerno-Sonnenberg tore through the bravura movements with crackling, demonic energy, with Harth-Bedoya and the orchestra matching her speed and precision measure for measure. But she was even better in traversing the desolation and anguish of the other sections.

The two worlds improbably come together in the long cadenza bridging the last two movements. Shostakovich makes the segment -- usually an occasion to show off the soloist’s technique -- a frantic, incantatory effort to rekindle the world, to bring the dead back to life. Salerno-Sonnenberg accomplished the goal with passionate, demented dedication.

Harth-Bedoya opened the program with the prelude to Mussorgsky’s opera “Khovanshchina,” using Shostakovich’s orchestration rather than the more familiar Rimsky-Korsakov version. The Shostakovich approach is leaner and more transparent than his predecessor’s but no less effective in expressing an essential Russian soulfulness.

The Russian connection continued indirectly in the rest of the program, Ravel’s “Rapsodie espagnole” and “La Valse.” It was Rimsky-Korsakov who revealed the possibilities of a modern orchestra to all later composers, and for all the differences between their styles, Ravel learned Rimsky-Korsakov’s lessons well in these diaphanous, sometimes elusive, brilliantly orchestrated pieces.

The Philharmonic played them splendidly. Harth-Bedoya, the orchestra’s former associate conductor, led the works from memory.