MUSIC REVIEW : A Little Healthy Friction? : Meeting for the first time this season, the progressive music-director-to-be and his conservative audience challenged each other.

Esa-Pekka Salonen, we are assured, holds the future of our Philharmonic in his flamboyant hands. Thursday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, he taught Los Angeles a few more things about his musical persona.

For his first concert of the season, he juxtaposed a pair of French masterpieces from the turn of the century with two works from his native Finland, one old and one very new.

The Music Center audience, in turn, taught the youthful music-director-to-be a few things of its own about local artistic perspectives. Significantly, perhaps, the house was less than full.

The on-going relationship between the adventurous maestro and our essentially conservative public will be interesting to observe. Perhaps we should brace ourselves for a little healthy friction.

It is clear that Salonen is not going to settle for lazy solutions to contemporary problems. Our potential sonic savior is a man of his time, unburdened with a lot of historical baggage. His dedication to musical exploration far exceeds anything we have experienced with his predecessors on the Philharmonic podium.

This music director won’t lull the subscribers with a steady stream of pretty, familiar tunes. He doesn’t particularly want to send the masses home humming. He does, however, want to send them home thinking.

It won’t be easy. Still, if anyone can plead the case for modernism persuasively in this town, Salonen may be the man.

Los Angeles loves a hero, especially if he looks the part and speaks with a slight accent. Salonen is handsome, boyish, slim, blond, energetic, capable of picturesque passion and exotically foreign. He might have been sent to us by Central Casting.

Luckily, he also happens to be immensely talented. Given time and proper conditioning, he might just persuade Los Angeles to embrace his progressive aesthetic.

A push-button ovation greeted his entrance. It soon became clear, however, that many in the crowd of well-wishers were more eager to clap than to listen.

Before the final pianissimo cadences of Sibelius’ “En Saga” could even begin to evaporate, the mood was shattered by insensitive applause. Salonen looked startled. He didn’t look pleased.

One expected the worst at the end of “Du Cristal,” the seemingly chaotic new piece by Salonen’s compatriot Kaija Saariaho that opened the second half of the program. Philharmonic regulars have been known in the past to make rude remarks, walk out, even boo when confronted with anything so unhummable.

Not this time. The first-nighters listened stoically and applauded politely. They registered neither enthusiasm--which would have been surprising--nor disapproval--which might have been candid. They followed their potential leader, took their medicine, and looked forward to washing away any dissonant memories in the waves of Debussy’s “La Mer,” which was to follow.

Comprehension of the relatively forbidding idiom might have been enhanced, incidentally, with penetrable annotation. In lieu of a good program note, however, the management reprinted a chatty, quizzical, quasi-analytical letter to the composer, written by a Finnish colleague. It only served the cause of obfuscation. Salonen may want to pay some special attention to this aspect of his missionary work when he takes up residence here in 1992.

Saariaho’s score, commissioned by the Philharmonic in association with the Helsinki Festival, makes a mighty, multitextured noise. It raves and rumbles with aggressive force, yet compels attention by constantly shifting rhythmic gears and frequently altering textural focus.

Just when the music seems most unyielding in its density and toughness, it reveals an unexpected, even delicate melodic fragment or adds a new splash of color. Saariaho’s complex structural devices demand intense concentration. Clarification of her intentions will, no doubt, come with repeated exposure. When Salonen settles in, it might be useful if he gave us a lot of routine second performances along with the wonted glamorous premieres.

The conventional part of this program on Thursday confirmed his technical prowess as well as his temperamental abandon. In “Ma Mere l’Oye,” he mothered Ravel’s goose with ravishing tone and expressive refinement. In Debussy’s “Mer,” long a Philharmonic specialty, he favored storm over calm. In the process, he invoked shades of Mehta rather than Giulini, but his brisk and broad performance made sense on its own incisive terms.

In Sibelius’ somewhat soggy “Saga,” he allowed the music to brood and soar with poignant theatricality. His abiding conviction made the premature applause doubly regrettable.

The Philharmonic played brilliantly for its incipient boss in all cases. Already, he seems to bring out the best in the band.