PETER SERKIN SOLOIST : RATTLE IN TAKEMITSU, MAHLER

Simon Rattle and the Los Angeles Philharmonic looked both forward and backward Thursday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

They looked backward to a triumphant Rattle specialty--the mighty, sprawling, gnarled, redundant, wondrous, expansive, indulgent, gut-thumping, sometimes simplistic, sometimes supercomplex, excruciatingly ethereal, 75-minute Tenth Symphony of Mahler, as lovingly, knowingly and cautiously reconstituted by Deryck Cooke and friends.

Our principal guest conductor had overwhelmed Los Angeles with the work in 1982, and his subsequent recording with his Birminghamsters has reaped worldwide acclaim.

When the Storm of the Mahler Tenth Subsided, Rattle Impelled a Moment of Silence That Defied the Audience to Breathe, Much Less Applaud Rattle and his Angelicans looked forward, briefly, with the world premiere of Toru Takemitsu’s “Riverrun,”an effectively reflective little piano-and-orchestra essay commissioned by the Philharmonic for Peter Serkin.

The assembled forces also took advantage of the occasion to look forward to their East Coast tour, which begins Thursday in Greenvale, N.Y., and continues Friday at Carnegie Hall with the identical program.

The program has its problems. For all its gentle invention, the Takemitsu does not stand particularly well by itself. It sends the audience into the lobbies for a premature and disruptive intermission 13 minutes after the downbeat--or whatever passes as a downbeat in this amiably amorphous musical structure.

The leaderless Philharmonic, moreover, isn’t playing like an ensemble of supervirtuosos these days. At least it isn’t playing that way consistently. During the Mahler the listener sometimes had to accept lofty intentions in lieu of lofty technical achievements. Still, there is a lot to be said for lofty intentions.

In the Mahler, those intentions impelled a highly charged, eminently poignant performance. It minimized the inequities in a vast canvas that has been stitched together, in many instances, from sketches, patches and hints.

Rattle rises to the mighty outbursts, and he savors the bold, even grotesque accents. Nevertheless, he seems to value clarity and poise over bombast, just as he seems to want to stress lyricism and intimacy at the slightest excuse.

He shapes the elegiac phrases with daring elasticity, yet values the power of understatement when the rhetoric threatens to get thick. He doesn’t bathe us, or himself, in musical molasses.

When things do threaten to get sticky, he moves onward with elegance, poise and dispatch. He acknowledges a gargantuan dynamic scale, but spends as much time as possible exploring the expressive possibilities of the pianissimo.

If such a thing is possible, he strives for Mozartean Mahler.

And, when the storms finally subside, the whimpers become mute and the last shimmers of the strings evaporate in tranquil rapture, Rattle impels stunned silence before anyone can breathe, much less applaud. The appreciative pause seems to last an eternity.

According to a note by the composer, Takemitsu was inspired in “Riverrun” by James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” and its liquid images.

The images are subtle. We deal here, for the most part, in modest splashes and soft ripples. Sometimes the overlapping impulses momentarily divert the tide in a novel direction. Sometimes tender clashes create new perspectives. Sometimes--not often--the composer seems to be treading water.

We are not concerned, in any case, with an impressionistic Debussy sea or a stormy Wagnerian ocean, though one can find traces of both. Takemitsu contents himself with the ebb and flow of melodic fragments in a fundamentally translucid, elusively tonal context. The piano dominates the constantly changing, intricate textures without daring to be showy.

This is difficult music that sounds easy, profound music--perhaps--that sounds simple. It is stimulating music, lovely music, unaggressive music. We have to hear it again.

Serkin played it beautifully and selflessly. Rattle and the orchestra provided sensitive collaboration. The audience was enthusiastic enough to summon the modest composer to the stage for three bows.