Rouvali and the Philharmonia Deliver Fire and Poetry in Costa Mesa
/By Truman C. Wang
10/22/2025
The Philharmonia Orchestra, from London’s South Bank, is celebrating its 80th anniversary year (founded in 1945 by Walter Legge) and currently on a five-city U.S. tour – Santa Barbara (10/20), Costa Mesa (10/21), Ann Arbor (10/24), North Bethesda (10/27), New York (10/28).
Santtu-Matias Rouvali, its principal conductor, is a first-rate conductor from Finland, clear, incisive, and thoughtful, and the Philharmonia Orchestra is an excellent orchestra. The lean, athletic string tone, the shapely wind phrasing, the general sense of expressiveness without fatness were striking. I have heard the orchestra and Mr. Rouvali previously on separate occasions, but together on Thursday night, their music-making was electrifying indeed.
The concert opened with Gabriela Ortiz's Si el oxígeno fuera verde (“If oxygen were green”), a disappointing choice of new music showcasing more today’s trending gender politics than the merit of the work itself. At twenty-minutes, the Ortiz’s meandering, abstract, bloated musical treatise on the environment and fractals (yes, fractals!) had many in the audience scratching their heads. The musicians played well, particularly the shimmering strings.
Then came Víkingur Ólafsson, the Icelandic pianist better known for his cerebral artistry than whimsical humor, a surprising choice for the Ravel G major Concerto. As it turns out, Ólafsson’s playing was pure magic. There was jazz-inflected wit and Mozartean grace in equal measure. The dialog of piano and flute in the adagio was a waft of fresh air, while the finale sparkled with mischievous brilliance. Two delightful encores - a Bach transcription and Rameau’s birdcalls (Le rappel des oiseaux) - were musical equivalents of deadpan slapsticks. (Those who love the silent comedies of Buster Keaton know what I mean.)
After intermission, Rouvali unleashed the full force of the orchestra in Shostakovich's Fifth. The symphony is a defiantly public work (as opposed to the highly personal Sixth): a long, slow tragic first movement opening followed by a stunning militant shock-and-awe, then by a bright, mischievous scherzo, a plaintive largo, and a jubilant finale. The Philharmonia played with white-hot intensity: strings slashing through the opening movement's anguish, brass blazing in the finale's ambiguous ‘triumph’ (a measured, rather than accelerated, crescendo to the finish.) Rouvali shaped the work's vast architecture with unerring dramatic instinct, never letting tension slacken for a moment. The encore, Sibelius’ Valse Triste, was haltingly, and hauntingly, beautiful.
A big shout-out to the Philharmonic Society of Orange County for their 72 years of bringing world’s finest ensembles to the OC.
Truman C. Wang is Editor-in-Chief of Classical Voice, whose articles have appeared in the Pasadena Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, other Southern California publications, as well as the Hawaiian Chinese Daily. He studied Integrative Biology and Music at U.C. Berkeley.