Music Reviews : Youth Symphony Gala at the Pavilion

For the single, downtown glamour event of his American Youth Symphony season, Mehli Mehta always produces the de rigueur celebrity.

So it was Sunday, except that the venerable maestro had not one but two famous guests--Gary Graffman and Werner Klemperer--headlining the 27th annual benefit gala at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Moreover, the agenda provided everything such a festive occasion needs: the exuberant splash of Berlioz’s “Roman Carnival” Overture to get things started, the virtuoso showcase of Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand and, as the evening’s novelty, a narration of Dante’s poetic allegory joined to Tchaikovsky’s sweepingly romantic “Francesca da Rimini.”

The AYS forces, 110 strong, did Mehta proud right from the start--refusing to play the Berlioz strictly for surface glitter, yet offering plenty of tautness and vigor where needed.

What’s more, they proved exceptionally sensitive in the Ravel, to which Graffman brought his customary mastery. Playing this work for two decades now he seems to find ever-new depths to explore, while exerting clear percussive force, crisply articulated allegros and light-fingered languor.

In the other guest spotlight was narrator Klemperer, popularly remembered as Colonel Klink on “Hogan’s Heroes,” but more profitably identified for all his serious stage efforts.

His reading of the fifth canto of Dante’s “Inferno” (translated by John Ciardi)--that part dealing with the ill-fated lovers’ tale--added immeasurably to the literary images of Tchaikovsky’s inspiration. And Klemperer conjured each voice expertly, compellingly, even movingly.

Yet one wonders whether the spoken interruptions did not rob the music of continuity, especially for young musicians dependent on it.

Nevertheless they played the love theme with remarkable lyric fervor and beauty of blended strings. While elsewhere a few solos bordered on raw and some agitated passages waxed unwieldy, the aching drama of the music was never less than true and deep.