Music Review : Pacific Virtuosi Displays Mendelssohn’s Passion

Felix Mendelssohn, the music-history books will tell you, was a classical throwback in the midst of a romantic revolution.

He favored balance, proportion and restraint over emotional outpouring and excess. He kept his head while others were losing theirs. Yeah, yeah. Whoever writes those books couldn’t be more wrong.

Or, to give them the benefit of the doubt, they haven’t heard Mendelssohn played the way the Pacific Virtuosi did in a three-part 190th birthday celebration program Thursday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

Intoxicating, surging, passionate were terms that readily came to mind during the performance of the Trio in D Minor by pianist Leonid Levitsky, violinist Alexandre Brussilovsky and cellist Boris Andrianov. Yet there was no sense of excess or of pushing the music out of character.

Levitsky is the linchpin of the Virtuosi, having founded it in 1994 under the rubric of the Newport Beach Recital Series. This was the first concert under its new name.

Brussilovsky has appeared on the series over the last two years. But Andrianov, a 22-year-old 1998 Tchaikovsky International Competition laureate, was new.

Repeat the name: Boris Andrianov. He is extraordinarily talented and musical, plays from the heart, and imposes no egoism upon the score.

All three musicians have had Moscow Conservatory training, which must explain the uncanny ensemble--the similarity of dynamic, phrasing and attack--that no one has a right to expect from such an otherwise ad hoc group.

Examples could be multiplied, but let the outstandingly matched and balanced rocking figures between violinist and cellist at the end of the Trio’s second movement serve to make the case.

The concert was not, however, a total success. There were some balance problems among the sound of the musicians, which members of the audience experienced depending on where they sat in the hall.

From a seat on the left aisle about a third of the way back from the stage, pianist Levitsky tended to overpower his colleagues, particularly Andrianov in the impassioned Cello Sonata in D. Others seated elsewhere had different assessments.

For all that, this was an evening to cherish.

The program opened with the melancholy and tuneful Violin Sonata in F minor, Opus 4, composed when Mendelssohn was 14. Apparently, he felt no need to wow or overpower anyone with this music, so confident was he in its poised and masterly sweetness.

The Virtuosi ran a risk, perhaps, opening with such decidedly unflashy music. But they, too, knew what they were doing. They knew that the piece represented a distinct talent at an early age, and they knew what was coming from him later.

The three played the second movement (andante expressivo) of Mendelssohn’s C-minor Trio as the single encore.