The Los Angeles Philharmonic started its new season with Shostakovich's First Cello Concerto played by the brilliant young Sheku Kanneh-Mason with unusual introspection while the orchestra played with meticulous clarity, if little of the music's sardonic irony. With Gustavo Dudamel subdued at the podium and letting the music proceed mostly on its own, the dialogue which pervades the first movement was relentlessly absorbing except when loud orchestral outbursts obscured the solo line, and if it moved a bit mechanically at times that sort of suited the mood.
In the second movement, Kanneh-Mason's integration with the orchestra had the feel of chamber music as if the strings were consoling a colleague who was sharing the depths of his, and the music's, soul. Further on, the double basses were ominous and the celesta exquisitely sensitive before Kanneh-Mason transformed his ghostly harmonics into distant glowing stars. His cadenza was riveting and Dudamel brought back the orchestra for the finale with energy and smooth virtuosity.
When the audience demanded more, Kanneh-Mason returned to sit in with “at least eight cellos” (as Villa-Lobos wrote in his score) and play the Préludio from the Bachianas Brasileiras no. 1, four minutes of pregnant beauty fanned by a faint Brazilian breeze.
After intermission Villa-Lobos' 20-minute long ballet/symphonic poem Uirapurú (The Enchanted Little Bird) seethed with color and ambience from the start, vivid and animated by the things the composer does with strings that could have been written for a Technicolor biblical epic. The flute played it cool more than enchanting or even bird-like, and was soon lost in the jungle of orchestral outbursts including quacking winds, the flash of a Till Eulenspiegel chord, a beguiling soprano saxophone solo, and a violin solo drifting into the bassoons and low strings, before emerging at the end.
Although the two pieces are very different in their approach to musical materials, Villa-Lobos was understandably sensitive to comparisons with Stravinsky's ballet The Firebird and might have preferred it be programmed before intermission, if not on a different night. But while Dudamel's beautiful, if clear-eyed, approach made an interesting contrast to the lush recording Leopold Stokowski made in 1958, there was little of the wonderful dynamic subtlety and color that characterized his performance of the 1919 Suite.
Whether it was the velvet brass, the clarinets gurgling in vivd bas relief, the flute and other woodwinds rising out of the mist with an aura of enchanted mystery as they should have been in the Villa-Lobos, Dudamel was responding to the dance elements and at times with a hard edge. The sense of spent sexual energy after the dance had real weight, and when the horn at the end rolled out its grand welcome to the sunrise finale, it was tinged with a sad poignancy.
