calendarlive.com, CA
March 11 2006

Music Review
London Philharmonic fill-in wields a cannon for a baton

By Mark Swed, Times Staff Writer

Osmo Vänskä is a vivid conductor. He’s a deft musician, an intensely
physical leader, a manic musical chef whose hands and arms never stop
stirring, chopping, blending, stirring some more. He seems everywhere
at once, making sure that each section of the orchestra and each
individual instrument does his bidding. The sounds he gets are
intense, resonant, three-dimensional, powerfully inviting. He goes in
for loud, blow-you-away climaxes.

What Vänskä wants, Vänskä gets.

The Finnish conductor has been a big hit stirring, chopping, blending
in Minneapolis since taking over the Minnesota Orchestra in 2003. He
was a big hit with the audience at UCLA on Thursday night when he
made a last-minute Los Angeles debut conducting the London
Philharmonic Orchestra at UCLA.

Kurt Masur, the LPO’s music director since 2000, became ill last
weekend while conducting in Dublin and was rushed to the hospital
during intermission. He is now recovering from a viral flu. It is not
yet known whether he will be able to rejoin the orchestra on its U.S.
tour, which began Wednesday in Santa Barbara and reaches the Orange
County Performing Arts Center next week. Though a more sober
interpreter than Vänskä, Masur’s a control freak as well.

So what happens when one control freak fills in for another? I can’t
cite the physical or psychological laws involved, but what transpired
Thursday in Royce Hall had something to do with more becoming an
unreasonably whole lot more but seeming like less.

Vänskä accepted Masur’s relatively lightweight program of engaging
early works by Benjamin Britten, Mozart and Richard Strauss, along
with Khachaturian’s gooey Violin Concerto, and made everything
equally heavy. In fact, he made it weigh a ton.

I suppose the critic’s job here is to try to distinguish between the
levels of showing off that were gaudily on display in Royce. Like
Esa-Pekka Salonen and the many other Finnish conductors spectacularly
populating the international scene, Vänskä is a product of Helsinki’s
Sibelius Academy. But he is also, in a way, the anti-Esa-Pekka.
Salonen sided with the Modernists; Vänskä fell in with the
neo-Romantics.

He built his career not on the international stage but in the small
Finnish town of Lahti, at the same time attracting international
attention for hyperemotional, flashily recorded CDs of Sibelius
rarities.

Like Vänskä in Lahti, the LPO also has an outsider image. Of the five
major London orchestras, it ranks near the bottom in reputation. The
London Symphony is the most glamorous. The Philharmonia is known for
its spunk. The BBC Symphony is adventurous and not only media savvy
but part of the media. Only the languishing Royal Philharmonic gets
less respect than the LPO.

But just as he did with the New York Philharmonic, Masur, a
well-known disciplinarian, has clearly whipped the LPO into shape. I
might even say that the LPO sounded too good Thursday, which is where
Vänskä comes in. He began by blowing up Britten’s “Simple Symphony”
into an overinflated “Strenuous Symphony.”

A minor score for string orchestra written by an impossibly bright
and clever but still dorky teenager, the slight symphony charms with
its promise of things to come. Here, Vänskä got from the LPO such an
intense, extraordinary, suffocating thick string sound that the
“Sentimental Sarabande” slow movement became pompously lugubrious.

Pomp weighted down Mozart’s Symphony No. 29 too. Vänskä almost got
away with his big-orchestra approach, because he is such an
accomplished detail man, able to bring out all kinds of little inner
lines without ever breaking up the larger line of the piece. Still,
early Mozart can be only so sonically heavy without seeming
lumbering.

After intermission, a showy young violinist, Sergey Khachatryan, was
the sensation in the Khachaturian Violin Concerto. Even the program
notes, a fraction the size of those for the evening’s other works,
avoided the issue of the music, barely bothering to defend this
once-popular Soviet score by an Armenian composer.

Yet there could be no question that Khachatryan believes
wholeheartedly in the concerto. Born in Yerevan, Armenia, in 1985, he
is a soulful young violinist with a dazzling technique. He seemed to
know exactly how much sentiment was needed where, and how much
bravura.

Vänskä, however, didn’t. His too assertive, too poignant approach
sounded, in this score, phony. Khachatryan has just made a beautiful
recording of Sibelius’ Violin Concerto (in a pairing with the
Khachaturian), and it’s too bad Vänskä couldn’t have been
accompanying that.

Strauss’ “Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks” was a very noisy
conclusion to a long, noisy night. It was not merry. It was
overbearing. The LPO played superbly, and once more many interesting
details emerged from the massive onslaught. But enough was enough.