Despite Conductor Elder, Elgar Symphony Remains Grounded

Like a doomed dirigible, Edward Elgar’s massive Second Symphony seems a viable vehicle until it attempts to rise. Conducted skillfully by podium guest Mark Elder--countryman of the composer--and played with brave but forced enthusiasm by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the 87-year-old work returned to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Music Center Thursday night and failed to thrill.

Overwritten from the first measure, the piece is a compendium of pedestrian symphonic bloating, combining expert orchestral craft in a mundane and frankly British musical pastiche: patriotic fervor, lavish ceremony, dirge-like perorations, fustian rhetoric. One can compare the work’s overall style favorably to Wagner and Strauss, but, at least here, Elgar came up short on tunes--if not on endless and endlessly reiterative motifs--and musical inspiration.

This performance of Elgar’s overstuffed, second-level composition found the guest conductor’s clear and considerable conviction unable to save the work from mere earnestness, and the Philharmonic, though obviously willing, still gave it a sometimes ragged realization.

The first half of the program did not save the evening, even though it contained Alfred Brendel’s aristocratic and probing account of Robert Schumann’s well-loved Piano Concerto. The Austrian pianist brought fresh details to the joys of the pristine Romantic document, and even made the sometimes sprawling opening movement seem all of a piece. But, for some reason, he did not bring to bear all his many pianistic resources to the finale, and that movement emerged tepid and charmless.

The evening opened with Schumann in another mode, the darkly brooding Overture to “Manfred,” well-delineated by conductor Elder and the orchestra.

* The L.A. Philharmonic, under guest conductor Mark Elder, repeats this program tonight at 8 in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave., (213) 850-2000. $8-$63.