MUSIC REVIEW : Hasty Beethoven, Muddled Stravinsky : Concert: Much hype surrounded the only appearance this season by Esa-Pekka Salonen, music director-designate of the Philharmonic. But his program turned out to be problematic.

He came. He conducted. He disappointed.

Perhaps it was inevitable. Esa-Pekka Salonen, the music-director designate of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is enormously talented. Nevertheless, he is merely mortal.

One wouldn’t have guessed that from the hype surrounding his appearance at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Thursday. The trusty publicity machines tried to transform his first and only program of the season into a breathtakingly special Special Event.

Movie cameras and microphones greeted patrons in the parking area and followed them into the lobby. The momentous occasion was recorded, onstage and off, for a doubtlessly grateful posterity. Primed by the advance publicity, the usually sedate subscribers welcomed the handsome and boyish maestro with uncommon enthusiasm.

But something went wrong. Lightning refused to strike. The orchestra still sounded like the solid, slightly untidy ensemble we know and sometimes love. The repertory and its execution suggested a triumph of miscalculation.

First came Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1. Written in 1800, it is a transitional masterpiece that can be interpreted in a number of valid ways. Some conductors see it as a preview of grandiose romantic attractions. Others insist that it harks back to the neat but fragile intimacies of classicism.

Salonen apparently prefers the latter perspective. He kept the textures light, the scale small, the accents subtle. That was reasonable. His primary objective, however, seemed to be speed, for its own dizzying sake.

Haste, in this case, made distortion. It also produced distinctly nervous reactions from players who tended to scramble nuance in a race to the cadence.

After intermission, things got better, and worse, with Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex.” Better because Salonen has a real affinity for this stark, forbidding, deceptively complex score. Worse because the musical strengths were compromised by a fussy, anachronistic, distracting staging scheme.

The so-called opera-oratorio could have been presented as a straightforward concert. If the management really wanted to be ambitious, it might have opted for a full theatrical production. The Philharmonic wanted to have it both ways.

Salonen and the busy orchestra occupied their usual places, clad in their customary formal uniforms. However, the stage shell acquired some fancy lighting (credit Tom Ruzika) as well as a geometric linear backdrop (credit Mark Wendland).

In this Greek tragedy, directed by Gordon Davidson, the men of the Los Angeles Master Chorale modeled ominous trench coats. They sometimes executed portentous unison gestures with their right hands--while clutching the score in their left hands. It looked cumbersome but oh-so-modern.

The soloists, also trendily attired in overcoats and business suits, stalked the forestage area executing stylized robotic motions. The characters who happened to be blessed with sight were allowed to carry their scores. The blind or blinded ones--you could recognize them by their dark glasses--had to memorize their lines.

At the end, Oedipus groped his way across the stage apron, aided by brother Tiresias. Oedipus was the one with blood dripping beneath his shades.

No doubt, all this was fraught with deep meaning. The production was supposed to look daring, contemporary and mysterious. Davidson contributed a poignant program note about Sophocles and Stravinsky being “poets who tear away illusion.”

The result, however, resembled a shotgun fusion of music-making and play-acting. It was clumsy, and it was silly.

Salonen, who tended to get lost in the theatrical shuffle, enforced incisive attacks while doing his considerable best to sustain tension and heroic momentum. The chorus, trained by John Currie, sang fiercely and struck its poses bravely.

The cast turned out to be competent if bland. As Oedipus, Vinson Cole stressed bel-canto lyricism as much as the ever-objective Stravinsky would allow. Kathryn Harries, an excellent quasi-Wagnerian soprano, found the mezzo-soprano tessitura of Jocasta less than congenial.

Michael Devlin exuded numb yet forceful dignity as Creon and the Messenger. Michel Warren Bell (known as Mic Bell when he sang with the Fifth Dimension and in “Porgy”) was the warm-toned Tiresias. David Eisler brought finesse to the utterances of the Shepherd. Roscoe Lee Browne, reading Peter Sacks’ translation of the Cocteau text, served as the erudite Narrator.

Although everyone worked hard, the fates remained stubbornly cruel. Puffery notwithstanding, the brief and temporary return of Esa-Pekka Salonen could not be confused with the Second Coming.