PERFORMING ARTS: LONDON PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA
Washington Post
March 29 2006
Intangible qualities like chemistry and daring made the difference
in the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s impressive Monday evening
performance at the Kennedy Center. The orchestra arrived at the tail
end of a long American tour that saw its chief conductor, Kurt Masur,
drop out early due to illness. A busy month and no fewer than four
guest conductors later, one would have a predicted a solid if somewhat
bedraggled run-through with little of the luminous sweep and detail
in Eastern European music that actually came about.
The concert opener, Benjamin Britten’s “Simple” Symphony, Op. 4,
showed the nice connection between the orchestra and Yan Pascal
Tortelier, an experienced conductor of confident technique and keen
imagination. This lucid, well-appointed reading pointed to such
diverse influences as Bach and Sibelius.
Yet it was the gifted Armenian violinist Sergey Khachatryan who
sparked the bristling energy in Aram Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto
in D Minor. The 20-year-old virtuoso had an idiomatic feel for the
work’s ebb and flow, launching off a brilliant range of flourishes
and accents in a reading that magnified the music’s foreboding
contrasts. Khachatryan gave a beautiful encore of the first movement
from Bach’s Violin Partita No. 1 in B Minor, BWV 1002.
Multihued colors, churning rhythms and passionate melodies similarly
distinguished Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 in E Minor, Op. 64.
Tortelier balanced warm blending and clean articulation by turns,
bringing out the music’s glowing swells, tender lines and ultimately
triumphant mood.
The evening was a presentation of the Washington Performing Arts
Society.