LAPO

Enduring a performance of Edward Elgar’s Second Symphony should be no problem.
Bring along a good book and a soft pillow, and you’ve got it made.
Most of the audience at Thursday night’s Los Angeles Philharmonic concert at
the Music Center, however, had overlooked these amenities. Getting through the
Elgar Second under those deprived circumstances, then, meant spending some 55
minutes fighting off not sleep but insomnia. Sure, Andre Previn demonstrated
his expected skill in shaping the performance, but this hardly represents a
triumph of musicianship — merely of patience.
Elgar’s symphonic language presents no problems. It is the basic overripe style
brought to its culmination on the Continent by Richard Strauss, and blown up by
Elgar to such proportions as to make Strauss into a miniaturist. The musical
sequences mount, in a manner familiar nowadays from music that accompanies
movie or TV characters hurtling down dim corridors toward closed doors. The
orchestration has a kind of rolling, gummy majesty, but the lines of thought —
assuming that there are such — are difficult to tell apart in the sonorous
muck.
And yet the music remains admired in some circles, most of all in its native
England. A critic quoted in the Philharmonic program notes claims that this
music “still means much in the consciousness of the nation.” That stirs up a
real problem: how can a nation with this joyless, long-winded stuff in its
consciousness also produce “Fawlty Towers” and the Goons? There is obviously
more variety in this British consciousness than meets the ear.
Previn did, in truth, get quite a lot of brave and mellow noise out of the
orchestra, but that’s not really saying very much. Credit Elgar at least with
mastery over a tamper-proof orchestral style; it’s hard not to make the right
kind of noise here.
Far more convincing as a measure of Previn’s musical worth was the opening
work on the program, Mozart’s wondrous Clarinet Concerto, with the orchestra’s
own Michele Zukovsky as soloist. Zukovsky and Previn had, by the way, worked up
the performance on short notice, replacing the indisposed pianist Maria Joao {cq}
Pires who was scheduled for another Mozart work.
Like Previn’s Mozart performances two weeks ago, this was a triumph of serene
musicianship and a superior sense of the give-and-take that is at the heart of
Mozart’s concertos. Zukovsky, herself slender and reedy like her instrument,
bends and sways as she plays. Her clarinet cannot mimic such motions, yet its
music, as Zukovsky played it on Thursday night, had a similar beguiling
flexibility. The work itself, the last of all Mozart’s concertos, shines its
modest smile through the twilight; it is the work of a composer who, at
only
35, had already mastered the insights of a full life. The slow movement,
properly played, reaches toward the stars. It did just that the other
night.