MUSIC REVIEW : Harrell, Ohyama With Philharmonic

The program for the fifth week of subscription concerts at the Los Angeles Philharmonic looked only mildly inviting on paper. It was an agenda, led by Philharmonic assistant conductor Heiichiro Ohyama, consisting of an Elegy by American composer Samuel Adler, Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto (played by Lynn Harrell) and Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique.”

At the first performance Thursday night in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Music Center, however, mildness was nowhere in evidence. Ohyama and the orchestra delivered a powerful reading of Berlioz’s familiar masterpiece; cellist Harrell and his colleagues plumbed the sometimes-neglected depths of the E-flat Concerto, and the brief Adler piece started off the proceedings in serious vein.

Actually, what started the evening was most serious: a tribute, via a recording of Vladimir Horowitz’s playing of Schumann’s “Traumerei,” to the late pianist. This seemed to set the tone of this satisfying concert, since it put in a larger perspective the emotional range of the three works to come.

Most polished was the “Symphonie Fantastique,” in a sweeping and admirably detailed account which moved logically and with apprehendable continuity from first to last. All choirs of the orchestra rose to what seemed a special occasion, and the solo lines emerged with particular passion--especially those of clarinetist Michele Zukovsky.

Harrell’s touching and virtuosic performance of the First Cello Concerto turned out not to be the usual, heart-on-sleeve reading many soloists produce, but one more thoughtful, more self-restrained and ultimately more memorable.

The progress of feeling outlined in the work is thus detailed, nuance by nuance, the accumulation of strong emotions building, through the piece, to the final cadence. Paradoxically--or perhaps not so paradoxically--the lack of grandstanding from the solo cellist resulted here in a triumph for the composer. Ohyama and the Philharmonic supported Harrell’s concept thoroughly.

Strong feelings in miniature are the product in Adler’s brief, pointed and atonal Elegy for strings, a work written in 1962 after the death of Marjorie Fulton Harrell, the mother of Lynn Harrell, in an auto accident.