Music Reviews : Conductor Klas in Philharmonic Debut

The most difficult assignment a debutante conductor faces has to be a program of accompaniments: Such a job offers the most pitfalls and the least amount of glory.

Eri Klas, the 52-year old Estonian musician who holds operatic posts in Tallin, Helsinki, Moscow and Copenhagen, made his Los Angeles Philharmonic debut, Sunday afternoon in Royce Hall, in such a challenge, and succeeded incontestably.

Conducting concertos played by violinists Gidon Kremer and Tatiana Grindenko, Klas showed genuine authority in music by Arthur Vincent Lourie, Shostakovich and Arvo Part, crossing a number of musical minefields with grace, and sure-footedly.

Even more impressively, he led the accompaniment to Grindenko’s half-baked performance of the Violin Concerto by Beethoven and managed, with great skill, to preserve both his own integrity and Beethoven’s. Obviously, Klas knows what he is about, and has the technique and confidence to implement his knowledge.

Opening his UCLA concert, he introduced to the West Coast a suite from Lourie’s 1961 opera, “The Blackamoor of Peter the Great,” with palpable sympathy for the neglected composer’s colorful and provocative score.

By the time the St. Petersburg-born composer--a contemporary of Prokofiev--wrote it, Lourie had reverted to a post-serial, pan-European, mid-1930s style (he was formerly a serialist). The suite, in which Kremer was the incidental but definitive soloist, and the Philharmonic played splendidly, seems to have charms one would like to savor at length.

Klas closed the afternoon with one of the two movements--the active one, we are told--from Part’s “Tabula Rasa” for two violins, string orchestra and prepared piano. An engrossing, note-busy but harmonically static piece lasting just 10 minutes, “Ludus” holds the listener through an accumulation of sound-events in kaleidoscopic variety. The climax of the work became the climax of this concert.

Before that, violinist Kremer resuscitated Shostakovich’s sometimes lugubrious Second Concerto, making it utterly convincing even through what has always seemed its eternal tsimmes . For once, it made sense, spoke beguilingly, as well as in growing intensity, and ended before our patience ran out. An achievement.

At mid-program, Grindenko gave a fussy but unpolished reading--she not only used the score, she really referred to it--of the Beethoven Concerto, one apparently uninflected by long association. What concept one could ascertain here seemed messy; the playing, too, proved inconsistent in terms of both rhythm and intonation.