Los Angeles Times, CA
Jan 24 2009

Review: Gil Shaham breathes fitful life into Khachaturian

Coaxing, cajoling, beguiling, violinist Gil Shaham tried to build a
case for bringing Aram Khachaturian’s once-popular Violin Concerto
back to the mainstream in a performance Thursday night with the Los
Angeles Philharmonic. Slim chance.

The Soviet Armenian composer wrote the work in 1940 for his brilliant
compatriot, David Oistrakh, who championed it in performances at home
and abroad during and after World War II. Audiences and Soviet
officials loved it for its accessibility, Armenian-flavored
sweet-and-sour melodies, Technicolor orchestration and rhythmic
vitality. But with Oistrakh’s death in 1974 (as well as changing
tastes), the grand-scale piece not so gradually dropped from sight.

Some younger violinists have recently taken it up, however. Shaham,
unlike the stern-faced Oistrakh, displayed exemplary warmth and charm
in his playing and proved no less virtuosic. On the Walt Disney
Concert Hall stage, he was a wandering soloist, drifting now toward
concertmaster Martin Chalifour, now toward the violists, now toward
the conductor, Stéphane Denève (above) — with whom he
shared beaming smiles — and then toward the audience.

He went into half-crouches to launch intense passages, rose partway as
the energy built, reached full stature as the line matured and
sometimes even passed beyond it to arch dangerously back on his heels
and end with a flourish. All the while, his fingers danced up and down
the fingerboard, making the difficult, often nonstop challenges look
absurdly easy.

Yet the sprawling music was only fitfully interesting. The composer’s
ideas petered out rather quickly, his elaborations of folkloric melody
seemed simplistic, and his rhythmic concepts — although catchy —
grew predictable, unchallenging and repetitive. Khachaturian never
went very deep, nor did he express emotions memorably. It was, of
course, risky business to be a composer in Stalin’s Soviet Union, and
Khachaturian’s expressive caution is understandable, but it kept him
out of the top-tier composers of his day.

Denève, the burly, curly-haired music director of the Royal
Scottish National Orchestra, followed the soloist carefully and did
not venture to impose ideas of his own. Here and elsewhere on the
program, one questioned his grasp of architecture and his allowing the
brass to overpower the rest of the orchestra and reach near-painful
dynamics.

By comparison, the program’s closer, Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances
— for all its use of a similarly large-scale orchestra — sounded
restrained, even austere. Composed in the same year as the
Khachaturian concerto, Rachmaninoff’s three-movement work was the last
he wrote and is infused with an air of nostalgia for a lost world.

Denève conducted it judiciously, steering a course between cool
reflection and Romantic overindulgence. His most poignant moments came
in the central section of the first movement, with its luminous
saxophone solo, played exquisitely by James Rötter, and its
finely tuned balance between strings and piano. Rachmaninoff’s
orchestration here became almost subtle.

But the conductor appeared more rooted in the moment than aiming
toward a goal. Intimately scaled passages often ground to a halt, and
it was only when the full ensemble was again called upon that momentum
was restored. Still, the orchestra was admirable in its unanimity and
production of a lean, powerful sound.

The concert opened with a clearheaded account of Stravinsky’s jaunty,
bracing, witty Concerto in E flat, `Dumbarton Oaks.’

Los Angeles Philharmonic, Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave.,
L.A. 8 p.m. Jan. 24 and 2 p.m. Jan. 25. $42-$147. (323) 850-2000 or

— Chris Pasles

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