Music and Dance Reviews : Conductor Miller, Pianist Naoumoff at Music Center

Friday night, for the second consecutive week, a Los Angeles Philharmonic program offered the premiere of a work by a living American composer, a concerto played by a pianist of French conservatory training and, after intermission, a work from the standard symphonic repertory.

But this week, no scandal enlivened the Philharmonic’s performance in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Music Center.

David Alan Miller, the orchestra’s assistant conductor, led a mostly uneventful concert which opened with a charming, six-minute appetizer, crested on some elegant, if Romanticized, Mozart and closed with an overblown and noisy reading of Mahler’s First Symphony.

Raucousness is an infrequent, unwelcome guest at Philharmonic events in the Pavilion. With his precise but unmellow approach to Mahler, Miller seemed to invite wiry string sounds, poor instrumental-choir blends and tinny brass playing back into the lively acoustic of the hall. The conductor’s strong sense of pacing at least kept the noise-engine on track, and rolling. But the blast was not pleasant.

And it was surprising, considering with what sensitivity and full contrasts the reduced Philharmonic had accompanied Emile Naoumoff in Mozart’s G-major Concerto, K. 453.

The young, Bulgarian-born pianist exhibited admirable lightness and impeccable technical resources--masterful trills, exquisite soft-playing, articulate detailing--in combination with a bracing directness of expression. Obviously an accomplished and serious Mozartean--which is to say, a musician of substance--Naoumoff’s next visit here ought to reveal his Chopin-esque side.