BLOMSTEDT CONDUCTS WUORINEN, BRAHMS : JESSYE NORMAN RETURNS AS BERLIOZ’S CLEOPATRA

Herbert Blomstedt, the sixth guest conductor to parade past the Los Angeles Philharmonic this season, chose a rather strange hodgepodge for his introductory program Thursday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

It began with a healthy dose of modernism: the West Coast premiere of Charles Wuorinen’s “Movers and Shakers.” Wuorinen happens to be the current composer-in-residence at the San Francisco Symphony. Blomstedt happens to be the new music director of that orchestra.

The program ended with Blomstedt exploring--after a fashion--the cozy terra cognita of Brahms’ Third Symphony.

For most of the first-nighters, however, the important news came in between. The supersoloist, after all, was Jessye Norman.

When she last sang with the orchestra, nine years ago in Schoenberg’s “Gurrelieder,” Norman was just a promising concert soprano. Now she is a formidable presence, a grand personage, an awesome media darling, an adulated singing statue in the irrational world of opera, a bona fide, old-fashioned, get-out-of-the-way diva.

Here she was, at last, singing Berlioz’s dramatic cantata, “La Mort de Cleopatre.” Here she was, bigger than life, in more than one sense.

A woman of generous proportions, she slowly swept on stage, draped in a black-velvet tent decorated fore and aft with a riotous network of butterfly frills. When Norman dresses, she dresses.

And when she sings, she sings . Her voice is huge, warm, resonant, uneven. It rings brightly at the top, smolders darkly at the bottom. It is used with canny dramatic intensity, a keen appreciation of the long line, a fine concern for dynamic inflection.

Norman is not what one might call a subtle artist. Those who love Jennie Tourel’s classic recording of the same strangely affecting music know that the tragedy can be projected with understatement, and with a vocal instrument that is neither large nor particularly fresh. Where Tourel gave us an introspective, proud yet pathetic Queen of the Nile, Norman aims for the power of extremes.

Her climactic rages don’t just pierce the thickest of symphonic blankets; they rattle rafters. Her sustained laments add new, agonizing possibilities to the concept of legato. Her cries sear the air, her sighs of desperation evaporate in breathy pianississimos. She paints with many colors, many degrees of heroic indulgence.

Norman’s vivid performance, unlike that of her illustrious mezzo-soprano predecessor, is monumental. One may find more genuine pathos in the admittedly flawed, triumphantly intimate approach assumed by Tourel. Nevertheless, one cannot underestimate the flair and concentration with which Norman seizes the challenge. She makes Cleopatra, and Berlioz, work for her--emphatically, boldly, and with a pervasive aura of dignity.

She is a force of nature. One wonders why she hadn’t been scheduled to sing for more than a miserly 23 minutes.

Blomstedt, not a Berlioz-romanticist by nature, provided sometimes heavy-handed, generally appreciative accompaniment. It wasn’t his fault, of course, that the hushed final phrases of the strings were overpowered by air-conditioning hum.

In the Brahms, the American-born, Swedish-trained maestro from Dresden enforced clarity, logic, broad tempos and a certain cool air of pedantry. The performance reflected little inspiration but much somber dedication (an unfortunate technical mishap in the final cadence notwithstanding).

Wuorinen’s six-part “Movers and Shakers,” first performed by the Cleveland Orchestra in 1984, does a lot of moving and shaking in an agitated 28 minutes. A few reflective passages that enlist the otherwise ineffectual strings punctuate the instrumental storms. For the most part, however, Wuorinen contents himself with waves and splashes of compositional flamboyance.

The instrumental demands are virtuosic. The rhythmic structure is jagged, the dynamic scheme fierce, the serial definition complex.

Wuorinen makes a mighty noise, and he makes it craftily--perhaps even angrily. Obviously, it is not his intention to soothe any savage breasts.

The orchestra and much (not all) of the audience responded politely.