Emmanuel Tjeknavorian’s LA Phil Debut

Harlow Robinson writes in San Francisco Classical Voice that the Los Angeles Philharmonic's July 30 concert at the Hollywood Bowl was an auspicious debut for Emmanuel Tjeknavorian. The 31-year-old Austrian-Armenian conductor, now music director of the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano, is the son of Loris Tjeknavorian, the Iranian-Armenian composer and conductor who was born in Borujerd, taught at the Tehran Conservatory and later led the Armenian Philharmonic. Emmanuel studied conducting with his father. The evening opened with his own arrangement of excerpts from Khachaturian's "Gayane," the 1942 ballet set in a collective farm village in Armenia, in which Gayane tries to free herself from a drunken husband. Robinson notes that the libretto was revised repeatedly through the late 1940s and 1950s to meet changing ideological demands, and that the drunken husband was eventually written out as a socially undesirable element. The "Sabre Dance" was played with brio. It became, to the composer's own dismay, his best-known piece, overshadowing his more serious work. In Tchaikovsky's "Variations on a Rococo Theme," Zlatomir Fung gave a light, youthful reading suited to the work's classical spirit. Fung is the first American in four decades to take First Prize in the cello division of the International Tchaikovsky Competition. The program closed with Ravel's orchestration of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition." The LA Phil knows the score almost too well, Robinson writes, yet under Tjeknavorian's athletic and graceful direction it sounded anything but routine, and the chimes of "The Great Gate of Kiev" brought the night to its climax.