Concert Review                                by Classical Voice
 

Powerful Tchaikovsky Fourth rocks Disney Hall

By Truman Wang
April 16, 2011

LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC
Vassily Sinaisky, conductor
Nikolaj Znaider, violin

Elgar: Violin Concerto in B-minor, Op.61
Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 4 in F-minor, Op.34

Saturday, April 16, 2011 at Walt Disney Concert Hall

T

here is no denying the estimable skills of violinist Nikolaj Znaider who, armed with his ravishing-sounding 1741 “Kreisler” Guarneri, managed to turn Elgar’s laboriously bloated Violin Concerto into a labor of love, or a chanson d’amour, if a rather long-winded one. At 45-minutes long, Elgar’s Violin Concerto would shock those listeners expecting to hear catchy little tunes found in the composer’s popular miniature works – the Pomp and Circumstance marches, the ‘Enigma’ Variations, etc. Instead, a highly hummable tune (if Victorian anthems are your thing) is stretched over the long length of the work, until it finally dissipates into fragmented remains and meets its long-overdue demise. Violinist Znaider has recently recorded the work for RCA Red Seal and it’s probably safe to say his efforts will not be surpassed anytime soon. In the concert, as on the recording, Znaider produced big, lush Romantic sounds and clearly enjoyed the many vapid, bravura passages of the Concerto. The L.A. Phil musicians played well under its Russian guest conductor Vassily Sinaisky, who wielded a precise yet powerful baton.

Post-intermission, Sinaisky’s baton positively crackled in Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 in F-minor. Perhaps one should nickname his version of the Tchaikovsky Fourth the ‘Staccato’, for every bar, every note of the symphony was played with great verve and crisp rhythm – from the big, brassy opening of the Fate motif, the song-like Andantino filled with forward momentum, to the fiercely plucked strings in a wild ride of a Scherzo. Eschewing the usual accounts of the Tchaikovsky Fourth that wallow in the melancholy of Mother Russia, Sinaisky stripped the symphony of its layers of Romantic excesses and presented it in a thrilling new light. The culmination of his efforts, fittingly, was a fiery Finale that shook up the hall and shot the stunned audience into the orbit.


 

To purchase tickets for Los Angeles Philharmonic's 2010/11 season, call (323) 850-2000 or visit online www.laphil.org

 

   

Truman C. Wang is editor-in-chief of Classical Voice, whose articles have appeared in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, the Pasadena Star-News, other Southern California publications, as well as the Hawaiian Chinese Daily.

 

 

 

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