MUSIC REVIEW : Philharmonic Gives Local Premiere of Adams’ ‘Harmonium’

For its second concert agenda of the new year, the Los Angeles Philharmonic offered on Thursday night oddball programming and some unfocused performances at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Led by principal guest conductor Simon Rattle, the orchestra gave the first local hearing of John Adams’ “Harmonium” on a program also containing familiar works by Ravel and Mozart.

The combination turned out to be disorienting.

At the beginning of the evening, seven members of the Philharmonic, without a conductor, and looking very lonely on a stage otherwise occupied by music stands and empty chairs, played Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro for the assembled subscription audience.

At the end, the full orchestra, with 120 singers of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, filled the stage for Adams’ full-strength, 1980 cantata. In between, a reduced Philharmonic played Mozart’s Symphony No. 40. And, when it was all over, the three performances seemed to have no relation to one another.

“Harmonium,” a three-part work using texts of John Donne and Emily Dickinson, and originally commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony, produces striking orchestral and choral sonorities, paints handsome sound-pictures and lyric moments, and, at its mighty climax, makes an attractive noise.

In it, the composer recycles traditional harmonies without resorting to cliches, and constructs long, accessible musical lines of some individuality; the entire, half-hour work can be compared, not unfavorably, to such recognized 20th-Century models as “Carmina Burana” and “Belshazzar’s Feast.”

The Thursday performance, not as relaxed or polished as the final one in the series may be on Sunday afternoon, had a nervous edge but went along, bravely. Rattle--who this time turned in his trademark red cummerbund for a white one--conducted gamely, the orchestra played carefully, and the Master Chorale, making a smaller, less orotund sound than one would normally expect from a group this large, followed suit.

Before intermission, Mozart’s G-minor Symphony, in Rattle’s generalized approach, emerged less than transparent and sparkling. At least part of the fault may have been in the placement of the players, flat on the floor, without risers, a placement that usually produces homogeneity of orchestral tone--and from which some conductors can bring out certain inner voices or blend others, at will.

No such manipulations happened here; grayness of expression and voicing marked this reading. It went along, but did not rise to specific contrasts.

There was more energy and character in the curtain-raiser. Lou Anne Neill, the Philharmonic’s principal harp for the past half-decade, presided stylishly over an unconducted reading of Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro--in its original septet instrumentation--that surveyed the moods and re-created the peaks of this cherishable work.

Neill’s colleagues were violinists Alexander Treger and Harold Dicterow, violist D. A. Hikawa, cellist Daniel Rothmuller, flutist Janet Ferguson and clarinetist Michele Zukovsky.