Russians Exhibit Flair at Tchaikovsky Festival

Whatever the political or economic turmoil in Russia, performing arts remain a reliable export with strong foreign markets. This weekend a 30-year-old ensemble making its U.S. debut, the St. Petersburg State Symphony, capped a five-day Tchaikovsky Festival at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts with two programs devoted to the composer.

Not its hometown’s most noted band, the State Symphony played with a sort of wary confidence under music director Ravel Martynov. With more young and female players than is common among the upper echelon of European orchestras, it looked and sounded much like an American regional orchestra.

Working from memory, Martynov led conservative accounts of the “Romeo and Juliet” Fantasy-Overture and the Fourth Symphony, cautious in tempo until the blazing symphony finale. Anchored by richly burnished lower strings, the orchestra took the big tunes with stylish flair. Transparent textures and the clear Cerritos acoustic exposed individual and ensemble lapses and some remarkably idiosyncratic sounds in the horns and lower reeds, but there was a consistent emotional expressivity to the playing.

That latter character was generally missing in concertmaster Andrei Arkanov’s stand-and-conquer approach to Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. There were only fleeting glimpses of warmth and lyricism, with Arkanov’s interpretive foreground occupied almost exclusively by technical hurdles to be surmounted.

In encore Martynov and his orchestra turned to ballet, offering a quick and muscular but surprisingly effective pas de deux from the “Nutcracker” and a rhetorically ripe Intermezzo from Glazunov’s “Raymonda.”