MUSIC REVIEW : Salonen Explores Deadly Sins

Esa-Pekka Salonen, the brash new music-director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, doesn’t care much for conventional agendas. We are beginning to get the picture.

Thursday night, he opened each half of his program at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion with a Beethoven overture that his charges had never attempted before.

For a dramatic centerpiece, he turned to Kurt Weill’s snazzy-jazzy “Sieben Todsunden,” a.k.a. “Seven Deadly Sins.” The Philharmonic had ventured this bitterly satirical ballet chant (bereft of ballet, alas) only once, a decade ago.

For a grand finale and a return to terra firma --everything, of course, is relative--Salonen chose the abrasive heroics of Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements.

This was a stimulating evening. No doubt about that. It also turned out to be an unsettling evening.

The combination of carefully balanced disparities seemed to make better sense on paper than in performance. The centerpiece suffered from a severe case of stylistic distortion. And the audience, not exactly huge at the outset, shrank considerably as the event wore on.

Both samplings of obscure Beethoven testified to the youthful maestro’s probing intellect. The “Konig Stephan” overture, written in 1811, reflected a curious fusion of symphonic majesty (the outer sections) and hurdy-gurdy vulgarity (the funny little march in the middle). The “Namensfeier” overture revealed Beethoven as an alarming modernist who, in 1814, dared to toy with violent dissonance.

Salonen dashed through each challenge with zest that never courted chaos. The Philharmonic responded brilliantly.

The Weill period piece of 1933 was another matter. With its bleakly sarcastic text by Bertolt Brecht, its decadent theatrical ambience and grim political criticism, “Sieben Todsunden” makes two essential demands upon its performer: The words must be intelligible, and the tone must be casually sleazy. Salonen succumbed to miscalculation on both counts.

He opted for the original German, which the public could not understand and which the singers tended to mangle. Comprehension was further compromised by the translation printed in the program magazine, a fanciful performing version by Auden and Kallman that ignored both the letter and spirit of Brecht’s amusingly nasty law.

Even more damaging, Salonen sanitized the score. He encouraged his instrumental ensemble to play the honky-tonk tunes with squeaky-clean bravura. He let his vocal protagonist, Elise Ross, sing Anna I with high-falutin operatic fervor, forgetting that Weill wrote the part for a fragile cabaret chanteuse--his wife, Lotte Lenya.

On her own glamorous terms, Ross was reasonably persuasive. She sustained an appropriately knowing, mildly sardonic aura, even within the concert milieu, and she traced the odd melodic contours with security and amplitude. The context, unfortunately, remained all too exalted.

The mezzo-soprano had undertaken the same duties at the Music Center in 1982 under the baton of her husband, Simon Rattle. On that occasion, she was allowed to utilize the English translation of David Parry. This was a step in the wrong direction.

Ross, incidentally, was serving this time as a replacement for Maria Ewing. The diva bowed out of the lightweight assignment, we are told, because she found it incompatible with Puccini’s “Tosca,” which is on her local schedule for Nov. 8. One wonders why she did not notice the conflict--if indeed there is one--when she signed her contract.

Michael Gallup, basso for all seasons, dominated the close-harmony quartet that impersonates the dual-heroine’s family. He portrayed the mother, abetted by Greg Fedderly (who, more than anyone, should brush up his Deutsch ), Mallory Walker and Robin Buck.

The concert reached its climax, literally and figuratively, in Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements. Very much in his element here, Salonen slashed his way into the piece with fierce determination, incisive articulation and breathless abandon. And he never let the tension, or the clarity, flag.

One might quibble that he refused to relax even in the jaunty Andante. But his vigor provided its own compulsion.

This was fine frenzy. The Philharmonic accommodated it with dazzling bravado.

The audience? Those who stayed cheered. Wildly.