MUSIC REVIEW : Salonen Bids a Temporary Farewell

Esa-Pekka Salonen is completing his first homestand of the Philharmonic season this week at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

He won’t be back until Feb. 18, when he undertakes the first of four consecutive programs. Three more are scheduled at the end of the season, beginning April 17.

Looking back on his first five concerts as music director, one can see certain trends. The bright and brash young man from Helsinki doesn’t like conventional programs. When he does turn to household-name composers, he tries to avoid household-name repertory.

It may be significant that the most familiar item on the agenda Thursday night turned out to be Sibelius’ “Swan of Tuonela.” Everything is relative.

Salonen’s concerts sometimes make better sense in theory than in practice. His dedication to novelty has not created any box-office stampedes.

Although the honeymoon is hardly over, empty seats already are common in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. On several recent occasions, the image-conscious management has resorted to the fine old art of hall papering. Those subscribers who like a comfy snooze with mild symphonic accompaniment at the Music Center may not be ecstatic. But those who like a little stimulation (the adjective is emphatically operative) in their Philharmonic fare are beginning to make some healthy discoveries: There is life beyond the “Pathetique,” and one doesn’t have to be able to hum along with the maestro to appreciate his art and mind.

The essentially conservative Los Angeles audience may not yet be prepared to embrace Salonen without reservation, but that doesn’t seem to be the case with our orchestra. The Philharmonic, which can be a distressingly stodgy and dutiful ensemble when inspiration flags, is playing for its new boss with a virtually unprecedented combination of precision, flexibility and flair.

Also enthusiasm. There may be hope.

The festivities on Thursday began with the U.S. premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s “. . . a la Fumee,” a companion piece to her “Du cristal,” which Salonen introduced here in November, 1990. A cleverly structured, boldly abrasive essay in timbre and texture contrasts, it makes a mighty, carefully calibrated noise as it engages a large orchestral apparatus in a tough dynamic workout for 20 climactic minutes.

Saariaho makes canny use of electronic modification--let’s not call it distortion--for the intricate utterances of the alto flute and cello. The able soloists, imported from Finland for the occasion, were Petri Alanko and Anssi Karttunen. The fearless orchestra crashed and seethed around the smoky central abstractions with disciplined bravura.

It wasn’t exactly pretty. And, given some of the inherent modernist cliches, it didn’t seem all that new. But it did get the evening off to a bracing start. The stoic first-nighters applauded politely.

The center of the program found Salonen providing an extraordinarily sensitive orchestral framework for Cho-Liang Lin’s extraordinarily refined--yet never precious--performance of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1. The soloist proved, once again, that his slender tone and elegant expressive scale need not preclude heroic impact.

He has a brilliant technique. He demonstrated a clear sense of interpretive purpose, and he enjoyed the advantage of sympathetic collaborators. Who could ask for anything more?

At the two final performances this weekend, incidentally, he will play the second Prokofiev concerto rather than the first. Both the D-major and G-minor showpieces are to be recorded next week, and these performances apparently are supposed to serve as rehearsals.

Salonen returned to his Finnish roots after intermission for a dazzling account of Sibelius’ Four Legends from the “Kalevala.” As on his recent recording, he defined both mood and drama with more urgency and more poetry than one had thought the compositional sprawl would allow. Carolyn Hove was the poignant English-horn protagonist in Tuonela.

A small chorus of partisans out front mustered lusty cheers after the frantic finale. Those who long for kinder, gentler, more mawkish concerts will, no doubt, be ecstatic next week when Zubin Mehta returns to wade through an evening of Tchaikovsky.

The program--with Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto replacing the First--will be repeated tonight at 8 and Sunday at 2:30 p.m.