Music Reviews : Philharmonic Observes Prokofiev Centenary

In this year which marks the bicentenary of the death of Mozart, other anniversaries should not be forgotten. The 100th birthday of Sergei Prokofiev, for example--April 27--which the Los Angeles Philharmonic is noting this week with a Prokofiev program conducted by the composer’s countryman, Vladimir Ashkenazy.

At the first of four performances of this agenda, consisting of a suite from the opera, “War and Peace,” the Violin Concerto in D and the Fifth Symphony, Ashkenazy on Wednesday night in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Music Center showed himself again a leader who knows his way around the repertory he chooses to conduct.

He brought strong and abundant ideas to all this music, paced it well and let the orchestra alone--the smartest thing a conductor can do.

Ashkenazy remains a bouncy and nervous, rather than suave, podium figure, but the results he gets seem to prove his efficacy at communicating his solid, sensible views of the music at hand.

On Wednesday, the Philharmonic gave a highly polished performance of the piece it knows least well, less immaculate readings of the more familiar works.

Christopher Palmer’s smooth orchestral arrangement of seven excerpts from “War and Peace,” a work the composer did not live to see staged, made up the long overture to this concert. It is a suite which seems to lose focus as it moves along--the lighter weight material coming at the end--but attractive nonetheless, and written, apparently, with Prokofiev’s accustomed orchestral mastery. The Philharmonic made its 27 minutes glow.

Alexander Treger’s fastidious playing of the First Violin Concerto reiterated the Soviet-trained soloist’s musical and technical resourcefulness in one of the more cherishable concerted works of our century. The Philharmonic concertmaster carefully brought contrasts of mood and dynamics to Prokofiev’s pungent/lyric lines, without necessarily finding all the mordant wit or poignancy in them.

Ashkenazy and the orchestra closed the program with an authoritative, full-throated run-through of the Symphony No. 5, achieving less in the way of probing subtext than one might expect, yet strongly indicating nonetheless the work’s genuine import.