MUSIC REVIEW

Coaxing, cajoling, beguiling, violinist Gil Shaham tried to build a case for bringing Aram Khachaturian’s once-popular Violin Concerto back to the mainstream in a performance Thursday night with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Slim chance.

The Soviet Armenian composer wrote the work in 1940 for his brilliant compatriot, David Oistrakh, who championed it in performances at home and abroad during and after World War II. Audiences and Soviet officials loved it for its accessibility, Armenian-flavored sweet-and-sour melodies, Technicolor orchestration and rhythmic vitality. But with Oistrakh’s death in 1974 (as well as changing tastes), the grand-scale piece not so gradually dropped from sight.

Some younger violinists have recently taken it up, however. Shaham, unlike the stern-faced Oistrakh, displayed exemplary warmth in his playing and proved no less virtuosic. On the Walt Disney Concert Hall stage, he was a wandering soloist, drifting now toward concertmaster Martin Chalifour, now toward the violists, now toward the conductor, Stephane Deneve -- with whom he shared beaming smiles -- and then toward the audience.

He went into half-crouches to launch intense passages, rose partway as the energy built, reached full stature as the line matured and sometimes even passed beyond it to arch dangerously back on his heels and end with a flourish. All the while, his fingers danced up and down the fingerboard, making the often nonstop challenges look absurdly easy.

Yet the sprawling music was only fitfully interesting. The composer’s ideas petered out rather quickly, his elaborations of folkloric melody seemed simplistic, and his rhythmic concepts -- although catchy -- grew predictable, unchallenging and repetitive. Khachaturian never went very deep, nor did he express emotions memorably. It was, of course, risky business to be a composer in Stalin’s Soviet Union, but Khachaturian’s expressive caution kept him out of the top-tier composers of his day.

Deneve, the burly, curly-haired music director of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, followed the soloist carefully and did not venture to impose ideas of his own. Here and elsewhere on the program, one questioned his grasp of architecture and his allowing the brass to overpower the rest of the orchestra and reach near-painful dynamics.

By comparison, the program’s closer, Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances -- for all its similarly large orchestra -- sounded restrained, even austere. Composed the same year as the Khachaturian, Rachmaninoff’s three-movement work, his last, is infused with nostalgia for a lost world.

Deneve conducted it judiciously, steering a course between cool reflection and Romantic overindulgence. His most poignant moments came in the first movement, with its luminous saxophone solo, played exquisitely by James Rotter, and its fine balance between strings and piano. Rachmaninoff’s orchestration here became almost subtle.

But the conductor appeared more rooted in the moment than aiming toward a goal. Intimately scaled passages often ground to a halt, and it was only when the full ensemble was again called upon that momentum was restored. Still, the orchestra was admirable in its unanimity and production of a lean, powerful sound.

The concert opened with a clearheaded account of Stravinsky’s bracing Concerto in E flat, “Dumbarton Oaks.”

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Los Angeles Philharmonic

Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 8 tonight, 2 p.m. Sunday

Price: $42 to $147

Contact: (323) 850-2000 or www.laphil.com