REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK:

One of the world’s premier orchestras, the London Symphony Orchestra, led by one of the world’s most in-demand conductors, Valery Gergiev, came to Orange County for the first time in 20 years, giving Costa Mesa audiences a technically brilliant and unsentimental performance of Beethoven’s piano concertos and Prokofiev’s symphonies.

Touring with Russian pianist Alexei Volodin, whose agility and seemingly effortlessly flawless playing matches the orchestra to a “T,” the LSO came to Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall on Wednesday and Thursday nights for back-to-back programs.

Volodin brought a clean, clear touch and a staid, unemotional interpretation of Beethoven’s lesser-known fourth and phenomenally popular fifth piano concertos. He negotiated the lightning-fast, Mozartean scales in exact, metronome time with not the slightest hint of a pained grimace. The piano was never muddied or blurred by excessive pedaling, and Volodin’s phenomenal technique made it unnecessary to artificially slow the progress or insert romantic flourishes where they didn’t belong.

Unfortunately, sometimes he also failed to insert emotion where it did belong.

There were a few tender moments — the sharp, poignant percussiveness of the piano against the warm, glowing playing of the strings in the slow, quiet second movement of the fifth concerto — but overall the renditions were straightforward and academic.

Gergiev, for his part, managed the orchestra the same way Volodin managed the piano. He is not one to dance around on the podium, wildly gesticulate with his arms and legs or make overtly emotional facial expressions.

Aside from occasionally bouncing on his toes and leaning forward, Gergiev stays comparatively still except for his hands.

Prokofiev’s first symphony, which, like many other composers’ initial offerings, is classical in nature, was an appetizer for the composer’s later symphonies. Gergiev gave a fast rendition of its light, energetic and harmonically consonant first movement, and a delicate reading of the elegant third movement.

Later the same night, when the first acidic brass notes of the sixth symphony sounded, it became instantly clear that the program had traversed 30 years of Prokofiev’s life. Blasting dissonance — nowhere more evident than in a few trademark harrowing chords that seem to contain every note in the musical scale — pervades the fifth symphony, sixth symphony and “The Montagues and Capulets” from “Romeo and Juliet,” which was played as an encore after multiple standing ovations the first night.

The formidable percussion section of the London Symphony Orchestra — booming bass drums, rolling timpani and precise snares — made the listeners feel the militant sections in all pieces deep in their stomachs.

The commanding strings that, taken alone, can fill the entire hall with sound, joined the percussion and somewhat meeker brass sections to create volume levels capable of making some listeners uncomfortable — a laudable quality in pieces that the composer intended to be fraught with discomfort, and are widely considered indictments of Stalin’s oppressive and dysfunctional political regime.

Despite the fact that the two concerts, presented by the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, fell on weeknights, the hall was packed.

Reporter ALAN BLANK may be reached at (714) 966-4623 or at [email protected].