Keeping Emotions in Check for Two Sides of Shostakovich

Inevitably, anyone who writes about Dmitri Shostakovich must deal with politics--the circumstances under which his music was written, what the notes really mean. Even upon the 25th anniversary of the composer’s death this month, arguments rage on as to whether he was a closet dissident or a sellout to the Soviet regime. The two works heard at the Hollywood Bowl on Tuesday night provide ammunition for all sides.

There is perhaps no more openly, unambiguously joyous music in the Shostakovich canon than the brief “Festive Overture,� written to order in 1954 to celebrate the October Revolution. And the yin to its yang is the Violin Concerto No. 1, an often bitterly emotional piece that emerged about the same time after being hidden away until Stalin’s death.

Yet the performances distanced themselves from emotional extremes--and there was a lot left unsaid. Leonid Grin--last seen in the Bowl in 1982 as one of Leonard Bernstein’s proteges at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute--could get a crisp response from the Philharmonic in the “Festive Overture,� but the slowish tempo dampened its unbuttoned spirits.

Concertmaster Martin Chalifour’s singing, slender, polished tone sailed flawlessly through the Concerto, yet his stance was mostly that of a cool modernist steering a neutral course. The emotional lid was on, and not until the climax of the Passacaglia and the Burlesque’s Presto coda could Chalifour apply some impassioned heat. Nor did Grin’s conducting generate the kind of demonic drive that might have kicked his soloist into another gear.

The Philharmonic continued to follow Grin closely in the Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 4; he certainly knows how to get an orchestra to play well on short rehearsal time, especially in the pizzicato Scherzo. Yet the rhythm went slack in the first movement, with little tension and force behind the concept, and not until the all-guns-blazing finale did things finally perk up.