Jurowski awakens the Orchestra

What Philadelphia Orchestra subscribers heard at the concerts the last weekend of October was salutary. It's the sort of programming I wished for in my last review of the Orchestra. (It was programmed, of course, long before.)

Vladimir Jurowski picked two rarely heard pieces by famous Russians, and he rounded out the program with the most familiar of all Slavic violin concertos. So the concert had a theme, as well as congruence with the conductor's background as a Moscow-trained musician, as well as a mix of the comfortable and the challenging.

To add to the excitement, we had the unexpected local debut of Sergey Khachatryan, a young Armenian violinist. At intermission all the buzz concerned this new kid: "What did you think about his playing?" and "What do you know about him?" It's the sort of audience involvement that's been lacking of late.

Khachatryan is a slender young man with black tousled hair and a self-effacing posture. He was in Casual Friday attire (for the Friday afternoon concert), with an open-collared black shirt and no jacket. He kept his head tilted close to his fiddle and communed with the instrument more than with an audience. The effect was intimate as opposed to outgoing.

His interpretation of the Tchaikovsky concerto was full of elongated phrases and lingering portamenti, so it was definitely Romantic yet unlike the big approach we usually hear. In a word, quite appealing.

Jurowski opened the concert with Stravinsky's atypical Scherzo fantastique, written when the composer was 24, played with subtle gradations of dynamics. He closed with Prokofiev's rarely heard Fourth Symphony. The performance included great solo instrumentals within a nicely shaped orchestral interpretation.

I'm bemused by the advertising that this was the "sumptuous expanded version of 1947" "“ as if to make sure that audiences didn't mistakenly expect it to be a more familiar version of the piece. (That 1930 score, of course, is hardly ever played.)