MUSIC REVIEW : Salonen and the Romantic Impulse

Esa-Pekka Salonen inaugurated his tenure as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic last week with a staggering performance of Mahler’s vastly indulgent Third Symphony. That should not imply, however, that the 34-year-old Finn is a romanticist by nature.

He isn’t.

He seems more comfortable, most of the time, in music closer to his own time. He thrives on complex technical challenges, and he often appears to prefer cool abstraction to warm sentiment.

He devoted two-thirds of his second program of the season to the emotional mid-19th-Century rhetoric of Liszt and Schumann. But, as if to remind us who he is and where we are, he opened the concert Thursday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion with a nod to the historic modernism of Arnold Schoenberg.

In context, this may have suggested little more than a token gesture. Nevertheless, it turned out to be the most persuasive gesture of the evening.

Salonen led the orchestra through the serial maneuvers of Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra (1928) as if he were confronting nothing more daunting than a Mozart overture. He dashed over the technical hurdles with nearly reckless abandon, yet always--well, almost always--managed to sustain clarity and poise in the process. He revealed a proper concern for detail, but never allowed that concern to obscure the grand line or to impede cumulative impact.

The Philharmonic proved its competence in this music long ago, in concerts and on a recording, under the more dramatic urgings of Zubin Mehta. The orchestra responded to Salonen’s comparatively casual demands with obvious zeal, a few roughly executed passages notwithstanding.

Under Mehta, the convoluted variations represented an act of homage and adventure. Under Salonen, they obviously were meant to represent business as usual. The progress is healthy.

Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto, which served as centerpiece of the evening, turned out to be more problematic. Here, Salonen demoted himself to the role of efficient accompanist for Emanuel Ax, who tried valiantly to mute the inherent gush and minimize the sprawl.

The popular soloist made the piano sigh, ripple and thunder as tastefully as the essentially uncooperative Liszt would permit. Daniel Rothmuller played the incidental cello elegy with exquisite point. Salonen sustained coherence conscientiously, if without palpable enthusiasm.

The result was an intelligent, sometimes even delicate reading of the creaky period piece. It hardly was a performance elevated by passionate conviction.

After intermission, Salonen returned to confront the sentimental reflection and poetic imagery of Schumann’s “Rhenish” Symphony. He could not have pleased those who cherish the memory (and/or recording) of Carlo Maria Giulini, who made this music sound so broad and mellow, so heroic yet poetic.

Still, one had to admire the flair of Salonen’s far more impetuous interpretation. One could pardon some fleeting orchestral mishaps in return for the climactic bravado that he enforced.

Here was the romantic Rhineland as viewed by a bright and brash young man of the 20th Century. For better or worse. . . .