MUSIC REVIEW : Glitches Hamper Bolshoi Program

Completing the two-night engagement which marked its West Coast debut, the touring Bolshoi Symphony gave a Tchaikovsky program at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts on Friday night. The orchestra’s recently named music director, Peter Feranec, conducted.

A greater expertise in this music--excerpts from “Sleeping Beauty,” plus the First Piano Concerto and the Fourth Symphony--may have given the 100-plus members of the ensemble a stronger focus than was noted at the first program Thursday.

Still, mechanical glitches, most noticeably from woodwinds and brass, occurred with an irritation-causing frequency. Whatever the current reputation of the theater from which the Bolshoi Symphony comes, this touring contingent is no credit to it.

Sloppy attacks, inconsistent ensemble and woefully second-rate solo wind-playing became the main business of the evening. Through it all, Feranec’s unperturbed and generalized conducting found no emotional subtexts in the scores, or even the urgent thrust of outer musical events.

Soloist Boris Berezovsky, calm and virtuosic and apparently unfazed by either emotion or technical challenge, sailed easily through the hazards of the B-flat-minor Piano Concerto, often producing mellow and edge-less sounds contrasting with his accurate and blurring bravura passages. The total turned into an often beauteous, regularly quirky and yet somehow impersonal performance.

On Friday, the Cerritos Center, not always a welcoming acoustical venue for orchestras of differing sizes, seemed even more metallic and unforgiving than usual.